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New Worlds: Pigments and Dyes
Jul. 4th, 2025 06:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
bvc_feedAustere cathedrals and classical busts in white stone; movie peasants in layered rags of brown. Despite what you’ve seen, the people of the past loved color as much as we do. They painted their churches and their statues, they dyed their clothes, and while it’s true they faced greater limitations in their color choices and availability than we do, they still made use of what they had.
One of those limitations, of course, was money. Some pigments and dyes can only be made from sources available in one region; for quite some time, the only truly vivid blue paint in Europe was ultramarine, made from ground lapis lazuli, which had to be imported from Afghanistan. (The secret of creating Egyptian blue, calcium copper silicate, had been lost.) Others are expensive because of the effort involved in their creation; harvesting saffron is a labor-intensive process to this day, and so even in its native range, heavily saffron-dyed clothing was usually an elite textile. Others combine both of those factors: Tyrian purple has to be extracted from particular species of sea snails found only in certain parts of the eastern Mediterranean, and you need massive quantities, with one historian estimating twelve thousand snails required to produce enough dye for the trim of a single garment.
These factors are familiar to many people, but others may be less so. In fabric dyeing, for example, the first batch of cloth added to the vat will absorb the most intense, saturated color. Subsequent batches will have progressively more washed-out shades. The strong colors were therefore often the most prestigious and expensive. You also have to consider color fastness, i.e. the resistance of a pigment or dye to fading in light, washing out in the laundry, or rubbing off on the skin. (Probably quite a few of us here still have the experience of noticing the spine of a book becoming more faded than its cover, due to greater exposure to the light.) Fastness in dyes is achieved partly through the use of “mordants” that will help bind the color, but some options are more color fast to begin with — and, naturally, those will be more desirable and probably more expensive.
With pigments, you also have to consider the chemical behavior of the paint. Quite a lot of chemistry goes into figuring out how to make certain colors; unfortunately for painters, many of whom used to make their own pigments, quite a lot of those chemicals were horribly toxic. (They also stank: both dyeworks and artists’ studios tended to be fairly rank places, and even the paintings themselves could be unpleasantly odiferous.) But in addition to poisoning themselves with lead and mercury and other inimical substances, painters had to plan for how their pigments would react with each other. The composition of a work wasn’t just a question of form and perspective and other such concerns; they had to plot out their colors to make sure adjacent pigments wouldn’t form a chemical reaction that discolored or destroyed them both.
TV and movies also tend to make us forget that the palette of available colors was restricted to what you could get from plants, minerals, and other natural substances. While some truly vivid colors were possible, many of them were softer, more muted. The TV show of The Wheel of Time did a good job of showing this: the rural people of the Two Rivers don’t all wear brown, but neither do their clothes display a lot of intense, saturated shades. Getting past these limitations required more chemistry . . . and this is when we started killing people with wallpaper.
Scheele’s Green is a compound invented in the late eighteenth century and used both as a paint and as a textile dye. It was hugely popular in the nineteenth century because it was more brilliant and more durable than previous green pigments; people used it for everything from decoration to candles to children’s toys to food dye. It also happens to be a cupric hydrogen arsenite — yes, arsenic. Even if you didn’t put it in your food, you wound up eating it anyway, because things like wallpaper continually shed arsenic dust into the air, contaminating everything around them. That’s a notorious example, but hardly the only onet: the nineteenth century saw a huge boom in the development of synthetic aniline and azo dyes, many of which were profoundly unsafe by modern standards. But they also let people adorn their homes and themselves with colors that were previously impossible, and so in an era when many hazards weren’t yet understood, fashion trampled safety flat.
These days we have regulations saying you can’t paint your home with lead white or other environmental hazards, and we’ve developed safer alternatives. Looking at what’s available in your local paint store, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’re done: we’ve developed pigments for all the colors, and there’s nothing left to invent.
For the layperson, that’s effectively true. But talk to a painter, and you’ll find out that there are still chromatic horizons to be conquered. Vantablack made news about a decade ago for being one of the darkest blacks in existence, absorbing more than 99.9% of visible light. It also made news for the controversy over sculptor Anish Kapoor securing an exclusive license for one form of Vantablack; only his studio is permitted to use it. The artist Stuart Semple retaliated by creating a “pinkest pink” pigment and licensing it to everyone in the world but Kapoor. We’re still developing the ability to produce new colors, and who knows where that could go in the future.
Especially since this wanders in the direction of weird tricks with optics and perception. There’s a whole category referred to as “impossible colors,” which are hues we’re not capable of perceiving under normal conditions. You can apparently achieve some of these by staring for a long time at a block of one color, until your cone cells become fatigued, then shifting to another; if you stare long enough at bright yellow and then at black, you will see stygian blue, which is as dark as black while also being blue. There are may also be colors outside the spectrum human eyes can perceive, though I’ve seen it questioned whether creatures like mantis shrimp actually see different colors than we do.
That uncertainty hasn’t stopped fiction writers! H.P. Lovecraft’s “colour out of space,” Terry Pratchett’s “octarine,” the seven colors of the “Neathbow” in Fallen London and its related games . . . these are generally used as markers of alienness, magic, or both. Sometimes they have special properties; sometimes they’re literally just decorative elements to make the setting seem more unusual, to extend it beyond the ordinary limits of human perception.
To fully explore this topic would require much more knowledge of color theory, chemistry, and physics than I possess. But if you find it interesting, I eagerly await your novel about someone attempting to develop a magical pigment for an impossible color!
