The links between colors, fashion and chemistry are multifold.  From Ancient Times, one of the main market for color was the textile trade and, as such, the textile-dyeing industry was a major engine behind color innovation.(1)  One of the most fascinating period of change occurred in Europe from 1704 to 1856, the dates of the accidental discoveries of the chemical compounds Prussian blue (former) and mauveine (latter).

Traditionally, dyes were extracted from living organisms such as insects or plants.  Until the mid-nineteenth century, red dyes were extracted from insects such as cochineal and kermes or from such plants as madder and brazilwood.  Prices varied depending on their solidity (colorfastness), depth and origin.  Kermes was indigenous to Europe and was highly prized but, by the late Middle Ages, imported cochineal began to take precedence as the most sought after dye.(2)  Combined with a tin salt, cochineal produced a spectacular red on wool and silk but gave poor results on linen and cotton.(3)  Its appropriateness for luxury fabrics made it so that in early fifteenth-century Florence, cochineal was twice as expensive as kermes.(4)  As a result scarlet, a particularly fine woolen cloth of unspecified color, tended to attract the most valuable dyes and became a color term for red.(5)  Highly valued, it was reserved for the fashionable elite and often adorned the traditionally blue-clad Virgin in Renaissance paintings.

A revolution in the field of chemistry allowed the art of dyeing to move-away from the workshops and, by 1918, be firmly anchored in the synthetic production of colors in laboratories.  Among the earliest turning points in the world of dyes was the discovery of Prussian blue.  Until 1704, blue dyes were mostly extracted from the woad and indigo plants.  Woad grew in Europe and, in Ancient Times and throughout the Middle Ages, was the main source of blue.(6)  Indigo, indigenous to India and later cultivated in the southern part of North America, in Mexico and in Central America, entered Europe in the eighteenth century.(7).  Its brightness, depth and beauty as well as its ability to adhere to most fibers without mordants (a chemical substance that combines with the dye to form an insoluble compound) (8) made it highly sought after.

A Berlin color-maker named Diesbach accidentally stumble upon a new source of blue dye while trying to produce cochineal red lake, a dye-based pigment for painters.(9)  Using potash tainted with animal oil prepared with blood, his resulting solution was extremely pale and, in an effort to salvage the result, he attempted to concentrate it.(10)  In the process, his solution changed to purple before becoming blue and formed a compound that chemists call ferric ferrocyanide.  Although less resistant than indigo (11), this alternative source of blue became fashionable throughout Europe and was used from at least 1723 as a dye for silk and cotton and as a coloring matter for house paint within the United States (12).

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(1) Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001), 58.
(2) Ibid., 96.
(3) Agustí Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 108.
(4) Ball, 96.
(5) Ibid., 204.
(6) Nieto-Galan, 28.
(7) Ibid., 17, 24.
(8) Ibid., 17.
(9) Ball, 242.
(10) Ibid., 242.
(11) Nieto-Galan, 19.
(12) Ball, 243.