Happy Saturday. One of our upcoming episodes this week is on Sir William Henry Perkin, who accidentally discovered a synthetic die in eighteen fifty six. That die, known as Malvin, produced a rich purple color and became enormously popular. We mentioned Perkin very briefly in our August episode, A Brief History of Colors, So that's our Saturday classic for to day since it's sets the stage for that upcoming episode with an overview of ways that people around the world have been creating dies and paints since before the development of synthetic pigments. And we also went into more detail about one specific color, which was the color blue and a show that we recorded live at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, d C. That one came out as an episode on October six, nineteen. So if you're like, hey, I want some more colors for my Saturday, that's where you can find that one. A World of Color Away to enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Crying. And we have gotten so many, so so many listener requests to talk about the history of a specific color. UM. Most recently it was Nicole who asked us to talk about the creation of the color move and before that, we had Door who asked us to talk about tell It, which is a blue dye that's really important in the Jewish tradition. He wrote an entire book on that one, and he sent us a review copy of it about a year ago. I'm absolutely certain we've gotten requests to talk about cockeneal red and a general history of the color blue. And I think those must have been on Facebook or Twitter, because I can't find them in our inbox. So we also very recently had a listener named Halah asked if you might talk about a general history of color or of dies, and so that's where we are today. A lot of these other specific requests that people have made of us are going to come up today. UM, but this is sort of an overview of dies and pigments and how we've been using them during or throughout history, which I love because I love color, and you know, related to t Stile and art and all the other people on earth. The nice, nice follow up to our recent makeup episode, which featured lots of color talk, so it all makes sense. So uh, animal, vegetable or mineral could almost be a guessing game about pigments and dies. People have been using all of these to try to make things prettier all the way back into prehistory. Are they most of the world people have had a lot of them to choose from. If there wasn't a plant source of red, there could be an animal. And if there were neither of those, perhaps they had a mineral that they could source for red color. So to start, ochre, which is made of iron oxide, is found abundantly all over the planet. Iron oxide itself is one of their most common minerals, and ochre is probably the thing that people used to make their clothing and surroundings more colorful before they used anything else. That was probably the first pigment, and ochre produces a range of earthy kind of yellow brown to red brown colors. It was used in some of the world's oldest cave paintings, so when you imagine those, you can pretty quickly conjure what ochre looks like and what the various levels of saturation of it looked like. And it was also used in textiles. We have evidence that prehistoric people's also used it to dye animal skins. And while it's been used all over the world throughout history, in particular, the Maori of New Zealand have traditionally used ochre extensively. They've used it on their faces and hair, on their canoes and homes, and on the bones of the dead. There's also in the yellow family saffron, which comes from the dried stigmas of crocuses um. This makes really rich yellows and oranges, and one of its most recognizable uses as a dye is in the garments of Buddhist monks. Saffron has a really long history of its own. It could almost go in the later part of this episode when we're gonna be talking about a few colors that have a longer history. But just as much of its history is about being a spice and a medicine as it is about being a die. I'm just having a moment where I'm remembering my mom's awesome saffron bread as we talked about them. Saffron Saffron rice is also diligous, so good uh Mata root can make all kinds of shades of reds and yellows. Cinnabar, which is a sulfide mineral, has been used to make red as well, although it is unfortunately toxic. So is lead, which we also talked about in our cosmetics episode, which has also sometimes been used to make red paints. In Europe, people used wode to make blue and purple dyes for centuries. This is a plant that changed in the seventeenth century and people started importing indigo, which was a superior source of dye from India. India is not the only place where indigo grows, but once it started to catch on in in Europe, the British started up a number of indigo plantations in India. This made India the main source of indigo for much of Europe, and this sort of led to a cycle of demand and more demand. Um they would plant plantations and demand would increase and there would be more plantations, and people were really working themselves to the bone on these indigo plantations. This eventually led to India's Indigo Revolt, which was an uprising by the farmers against the plantations and the European owners of the plantations. In eighteen fifty six and eighteen fifty seven, Indigo is still used extensively today, though especially for dyeing Denham for your blue jeans. So green tone have come from lichen, fungi and especially minerals. Copper has been a big one here, but cobalt has also been used to make some shades of green. When it comes to shades of black, there are all kinds of very common things that you can use to make paints and inks out of, including soot, ivory and bones, but you can't really die things with most of these because they don't stick to the fabric. For a long time, there was no true black dye. People in Europe would mostly make black fabric by dyeing at a series of other colors, which unless it was sort of a byproduct of re dyeing the same gown over and over as it got older, this was just time consuming and expensive. Yeah, that's even an issue that continues today when people purchase an article of clothing or a piece of fabric and they want to diet black. Even the commercially available dyes, what you usually get is a very dark purple. It's very ticky to get a nice saturated black, and that actually changed this sort of time consuming, really costly approach to multiple dye layers that they were doing after Europeans started making their way to the America's and they actually found a tree that became known as logwood, and the heartwood of logwood is very very dark and a true black dye could be extracted from it. Because the primary source of logwood was traitors from Spain, this die was actually banned in England from its introduction there around fifteen seventy five all the way to sixteen seventy three. Parliament claimed that logwood produced colors quote of a fugacious character. The Anglo Spanish War and other tensions between England and Spain probably had a lot more to do with it than whether the die faded quickly. There are also lots and lots of ways to make white pigments, including chalk, rice and limestone, and as we also talked about in our Makeup episode, lead lead as kind of a multi purpose component, depending on exactly what it's made with and how it's prepared. That's really why there's so much lead based paint around for so many years, so in most of the world, people have had quite a number of options for making a vast array of colors, but a couple of specific diyes have turned out to have really, really rich stories of their own, and we will talk about those more in just a moment. If Tracy would like to take a brief pause for a word from our sponsor, I would. One source of red around the world has been insects. The cocaneal is a scale insect that's native to Central and South America. Some people also pronounce it cocon eal, and Europeans got their first glimpse of it thanks to the conquistor Hernan Cortes in the fifteen hundreds. The various species of insect used for this dye are all in the genus Dactylopius, although Cortes's soldiers called them Cocnelia cultivada. The females live on prickly pear cactuses. The wind blows them from cactus to cactus when they're still nymphs, and then as they mature, they attached themselves to the cacti. The females are harvested from the cacti and then dried, and then they are crushed and bathed in acid. And a pound of dye contains about seventy thousand of these little insects. Some people, in addition to pronouncing cockn eal two different ways, also use cockoneal and carmine interchangeably. Other people sort of differentiate between cockneal and carmine as two shades of red. Either way, carmine is also made from these same bugs. Soon after Europeans were introduced to these insects, the Habsburgs decided to start up a cockn eal business, and they started exporting cocon eal back to Spain, and the cockon heal trade then spread all over the world. In the sixteen hundreds, dyers started figuring out how to modify cockneal to make all kinds of other shades of red, so the demand for its skyrocketed, although occasionally it would dip a little bit thanks to various economic conditions or perhaps wars. Entrepreneurs in Europe kept trying to figure out how to move cockeneal production out of the America's because, in addition to it being pretty expensive to ship these massive loads of of insects across the ocean, this was the height of piracy's golden age, which meant that ships that were carrying this red dye were always at risk. In the part of the Ocean that they needed to cross to get back to Spain. And although the insects themselves live in many parts of the world today thanks to very deliberate efforts to transplant them, actually getting a usable number of them to grow somewhere else turned out to be really quite a task. Ship after ship left the America has loaded down with plants and insects, only for something, you know, unt it to befall them along the way. Either the insects would die or their life cycle would be interrupted by the travel or a well meaning crew member would destroy those pesky bugs with salt water. Once the insects finally did make it to India, which was really one of one of the places people were hoping they could take off, it was without a crop of cacti for them to live on. They wound up surviving on a similar species that already lived in India. But even so, the Indian cockneal industry really never managed to supplant the American one. India was producing four thousand pounds of the die a year by sevente seven, but pretty much everyone in Europe thought it was vastly inferior to the die that was coming from Central and South America and cockneal is still used today, and one of those uses is actually food die, which is a little bit chagrinning and disturbing to people who don't like the idea of eating bugs. Unless you are allergic to them, there is no health risk and having them in your food. Yeah, I kind of look at that as one of those whenever I have a food revelation about, oh, this is actually a gross thing you've been consuming, I'm like, well, I've consumed it for years, right, And cocknell is one of the many things that goes in that category. We also have a few fancy blues to talk about, and I think blue is your favorite color, isn't it It is. That's not why we're talking about more than one fancy blue though. Egyptian blue is the oldest man made blue die and the oldest man made die in general that we know of, as its name suggests. That got to start in Egypt about three thousand years ago with the combination of a lime, copper, oxide, and quartz, and once these were put into a kiln in the right proportions, they were fired down to a fine powder that could be made into paints and dies. And if you are confused because earlier we said that ochre was the oldest thing. You can pretty much make an ochre paint out of straight up ochre and something to moisten it with, and this was a much more deliberate combining of multiple ingredients to make a die. Ultramarine has also been around for a really long time. It is made from lapis lazuli, which was primarily mined in Afghanistan. Making ultramarine from lapis lazuli was an intensely manual process. Powdered mineral would have to be repeatedly needed with lie to ultimately make this die. There's some evidence that the Chinese had access to ultramarine as early as the eighth century b c. There are some very ancient glazed beads that modern analysis has shown to have been made with ultramarine. There are also other blue pigments used in the glaze, though, so it is possible that the ultramarine was accidentally synthesized thanks to impurities in the kiln. We do know for sure that by the sixth century CE, deliberately made ultramarine inks appear in Byzantine manuscripts. Its popularity really took off during the Middle Ages in Europe, and because so much time, labor, and travel was involved in its production and distribution, it was exorbitantly expensive. This is one of the reasons it was used with very particular significance and religious artwork. The Virgin Mary often wears ultramarine blue clothing in medieval art, and the cost and expense is also why the French Society for the Encouragement of National Industry announced a prize for whoever could make a cost effective synthetic ultramarine in eighteen twenty four. And cost effective here meant less than three hundred francs per kilogram. I got into some drama about who eventually claimed that prize because there were two two people who independently of one another, came up with the same basic process for synthetic ultramarine, and then is often the case, artists didn't want to use the synthetic synthetic one because they thought it wasn't as good as the real one. Hellette is a blue dye that's very important in the Jewish tradition. It was traditionally used to tie blue threads used in the tassels that are in the corners of prayer shawls. This color comes from the glands of a snail, most likely Heliplex trunculus, and at first the color that the snails secretions produces kind of a brownish yellow. But if you soak cotton in a vat of it sort of vat, dye this cotton and then let it air dry in the sun, it turns blue. Talent is mentioned repeatedly in the Torah, and often in the same context as precious materials like gold and silk. The dye was so religiously important that the methods for making it were a very closely guarded secret. This unfortunately meant that the knowledge of how to produce it was lost around the seventh century as Islamic people's moved into the Eastern Mediterranean. Modern scholars have managed to recreate how to produce this color, but there's still some debate about whether it's exactly the same as the ancient hue described in these texts. And before we talk about another die that was definitely made from snails, we will take a brief break to talk about a word from a sponsor, stupendous. So we've already talked about some totally cost effective, widely available ways to make purple, but in the Roman Empire, people got a little weird about purple, and one color purple in particular, as with tell It Tyrehne. Purple came from sea snails, specifically Balinus brand daris, previously known as Murix Brandaris, and this die was primarily made in the city of Tire in what is now Lemonon. Its height of popularity was during the time of the Roman Empire, and it's mentioned at least fifty times in the Christian Bible. When it's living, this snail secretes a slightly toxic mukee is that's part of how it kills its prey. And if you crack open its shell you can puncture the mucus gland and get out a drop of that mucus. When this drop of mucus is exposed to light, it progresses through several colors on the blue green end of the spectrum before winding up purple. It took twelve thousand snails to make enough die to die one Roman toga. Consequently, an enormous hill of discarded shells formed outside the city of Tire, and today this hill has actually become usable land. It's home to houses, businesses, there's a cemetery there, and it's actually known as Murex Hill. There are still broken snail shells all around its base. That astounding twelve thousand snails number is why purple dye, especially tyrehene purple dye, was so expensive and associated only with the very rich, but by the year four hundred it's popularity had also made these snaps. E was pretty hard to find, so it became illegal for anyone who wasn't actually part of the royal family to wear tyree and purple because it was just too scarce, and you know, the royal royalty didn't want to lose their purple that they were so fond of. Both both Emperors Nero and Theo ds Is the Second considered the wearing of tyreean purple by Nod royalty to be punishable by death. Following the end of the Roman Empire, the color fell out of favor and people went back to the old standbys of indigo and liken. This is one of those situations where you kind of look at what it took to make this purple and the fact that you could make purple other ways. It was really it's not like that was the only purple that existed. It was just the only one that was so rare that people got a little strange about how they they were emotionally invested in it. Yeah, color status becomes a whole sociological studiable thing at that point. So eventually people figured out how to make synthetic dies. William Henry Perkin was an English chemist. He was actually trying to synthesize quinine, which we've talked about before. It's used to treat malaria in eighteen fifty six, and he stumbled across something else entirely, which was mauve die. And he was making this substance and it was kind of black and gross looking, and then he realized as he looked at it that it was actually kind of a pretty color in spaces in different spaces. Um This came to be known as analygine purple and as mauvine, and it was the first truly synthetic die. Perkin then used his newly discovered chemical process to set up his own die factory, and once Queen Victoria wore a move dressed to her daughter's wedding, which was in eighteen fifty eight, Europe was almost instantly caught up in mauve madness. Perkin then turned his eye to all kinds of other colors, and he ended up becoming very, very rich, but he gave most of his profits away to charity. This didn't instantly put an end to natural dies. There are still plenty of natural diyes being used even today. Many artists and artisans really resisted the idea of using synthetic colors, and at first analine was also very expensive. But the availability of synthetic dies did really change the playing field significantly when it came to color. You know why I spend so much time and effort farming cockneal If you can just make it pretty synthetic red, that's basically the same shade. And today colors have lost some of the connotations that they carried in earlier parts of history, especially in the industrialized world. It's pretty common knowledge that in many parts of the world, blue and purple were the colors of royalty. But today you can get a blue sweater for the same price as a brown sweater. You don't have to pay extra for a royal purple crayon. And today people might use the colors you wear to judge your personality or your sense of taste. But in places where synthetic dies are readily available, that doesn't actually extend to your actual social class or net worth. Colors are democratized. Anybody can have them. Yeah, and I read a really interesting paper that was about Yeah, people pretty much now will judge your color literacy, like whether they think the combination of colors you're wearing our tacky or two showy or something like that. Um, but that doesn't actually translate to how much those colors cost or what your actual social status is. Yes, it'll be uh, you know, to borrow from Project Runway your taste level. That's discussed so much your social standing. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works in mail address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. One of our upcoming episodes this week is on Sir William Henry Perkin, who accidentally discovered a synthetic die in eighteen fifty six. That die, known as Malvin, produced a rich purple color and became enormously popular. We mentioned Perkin very briefly in our August episode, A Brief History of Colors, So that's our Saturday classic for to day since it's sets the stage for that upcoming episode with an overview of ways that people around the world have been creating dies and paints since before the development of synthetic pigments. And we also went into more detail about one specific color, which was the color blue and a show that we recorded live at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, d C. That one came out as an episode on October six, nineteen. So if you're like, hey, I want some more colors for my Saturday, that's where you can find that one. A World of Color Away to enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Crying. And we have gotten so many, so so many listener requests to talk about the history of a specific color. UM. Most recently it was Nicole who asked us to talk about the creation of the color move and before that, we had Door who asked us to talk about tell It, which is a blue dye that's really important in the Jewish tradition. He wrote an entire book on that one, and he sent us a review copy of it about a year ago. I'm absolutely certain we've gotten requests to talk about cockeneal red and a general history of the color blue. And I think those must have been on Facebook or Twitter, because I can't find them in our inbox. So we also very recently had a listener named Halah asked if you might talk about a general history of color or of dies, and so that's where we are today. A lot of these other specific requests that people have made of us are going to come up today. UM, but this is sort of an overview of dies and pigments and how we've been using them during or throughout history, which I love because I love color, and you know, related to t Stile and art and all the other people on earth. The nice, nice follow up to our recent makeup episode, which featured lots of color talk, so it all makes sense. So uh, animal, vegetable or mineral could almost be a guessing game about pigments and dies. People have been using all of these to try to make things prettier all the way back into prehistory. Are they most of the world people have had a lot of them to choose from. If there wasn't a plant source of red, there could be an animal. And if there were neither of those, perhaps they had a mineral that they could source for red color. So to start, ochre, which is made of iron oxide, is found abundantly all over the planet. Iron oxide itself is one of their most common minerals, and ochre is probably the thing that people used to make their clothing and surroundings more colorful before they used anything else. That was probably the first pigment, and ochre produces a range of earthy kind of yellow brown to red brown colors. It was used in some of the world's oldest cave paintings, so when you imagine those, you can pretty quickly conjure what ochre looks like and what the various levels of saturation of it looked like. And it was also used in textiles. We have evidence that prehistoric people's also used it to dye animal skins. And while it's been used all over the world throughout history, in particular, the Maori of New Zealand have traditionally used ochre extensively. They've used it on their faces and hair, on their canoes and homes, and on the bones of the dead. There's also in the yellow family saffron, which comes from the dried stigmas of crocuses um. This makes really rich yellows and oranges, and one of its most recognizable uses as a dye is in the garments of Buddhist monks. Saffron has a really long history of its own. It could almost go in the later part of this episode when we're gonna be talking about a few colors that have a longer history. But just as much of its history is about being a spice and a medicine as it is about being a die. I'm just having a moment where I'm remembering my mom's awesome saffron bread as we talked about them. Saffron Saffron rice is also diligous, so good uh Mata root can make all kinds of shades of reds and yellows. Cinnabar, which is a sulfide mineral, has been used to make red as well, although it is unfortunately toxic. So is lead, which we also talked about in our cosmetics episode, which has also sometimes been used to make red paints. In Europe, people used wode to make blue and purple dyes for centuries. This is a plant that changed in the seventeenth century and people started importing indigo, which was a superior source of dye from India. India is not the only place where indigo grows, but once it started to catch on in in Europe, the British started up a number of indigo plantations in India. This made India the main source of indigo for much of Europe, and this sort of led to a cycle of demand and more demand. Um they would plant plantations and demand would increase and there would be more plantations, and people were really working themselves to the bone on these indigo plantations. This eventually led to India's Indigo Revolt, which was an uprising by the farmers against the plantations and the European owners of the plantations. In eighteen fifty six and eighteen fifty seven, Indigo is still used extensively today, though especially for dyeing Denham for your blue jeans. So green tone have come from lichen, fungi and especially minerals. Copper has been a big one here, but cobalt has also been used to make some shades of green. When it comes to shades of black, there are all kinds of very common things that you can use to make paints and inks out of, including soot, ivory and bones, but you can't really die things with most of these because they don't stick to the fabric. For a long time, there was no true black dye. People in Europe would mostly make black fabric by dyeing at a series of other colors, which unless it was sort of a byproduct of re dyeing the same gown over and over as it got older, this was just time consuming and expensive. Yeah, that's even an issue that continues today when people purchase an article of clothing or a piece of fabric and they want to diet black. Even the commercially available dyes, what you usually get is a very dark purple. It's very ticky to get a nice saturated black, and that actually changed this sort of time consuming, really costly approach to multiple dye layers that they were doing after Europeans started making their way to the America's and they actually found a tree that became known as logwood, and the heartwood of logwood is very very dark and a true black dye could be extracted from it. Because the primary source of logwood was traitors from Spain, this die was actually banned in England from its introduction there around fifteen seventy five all the way to sixteen seventy three. Parliament claimed that logwood produced colors quote of a fugacious character. The Anglo Spanish War and other tensions between England and Spain probably had a lot more to do with it than whether the die faded quickly. There are also lots and lots of ways to make white pigments, including chalk, rice and limestone, and as we also talked about in our Makeup episode, lead lead as kind of a multi purpose component, depending on exactly what it's made with and how it's prepared. That's really why there's so much lead based paint around for so many years, so in most of the world, people have had quite a number of options for making a vast array of colors, but a couple of specific diyes have turned out to have really, really rich stories of their own, and we will talk about those more in just a moment. If Tracy would like to take a brief pause for a word from our sponsor, I would. One source of red around the world has been insects. The cocaneal is a scale insect that's native to Central and South America. Some people also pronounce it cocon eal, and Europeans got their first glimpse of it thanks to the conquistor Hernan Cortes in the fifteen hundreds. The various species of insect used for this dye are all in the genus Dactylopius, although Cortes's soldiers called them Cocnelia cultivada. The females live on prickly pear cactuses. The wind blows them from cactus to cactus when they're still nymphs, and then as they mature, they attached themselves to the cacti. The females are harvested from the cacti and then dried, and then they are crushed and bathed in acid. And a pound of dye contains about seventy thousand of these little insects. Some people, in addition to pronouncing cockn eal two different ways, also use cockoneal and carmine interchangeably. Other people sort of differentiate between cockneal and carmine as two shades of red. Either way, carmine is also made from these same bugs. Soon after Europeans were introduced to these insects, the Habsburgs decided to start up a cockn eal business, and they started exporting cocon eal back to Spain, and the cockon heal trade then spread all over the world. In the sixteen hundreds, dyers started figuring out how to modify cockneal to make all kinds of other shades of red, so the demand for its skyrocketed, although occasionally it would dip a little bit thanks to various economic conditions or perhaps wars. Entrepreneurs in Europe kept trying to figure out how to move cockeneal production out of the America's because, in addition to it being pretty expensive to ship these massive loads of of insects across the ocean, this was the height of piracy's golden age, which meant that ships that were carrying this red dye were always at risk. In the part of the Ocean that they needed to cross to get back to Spain. And although the insects themselves live in many parts of the world today thanks to very deliberate efforts to transplant them, actually getting a usable number of them to grow somewhere else turned out to be really quite a task. Ship after ship left the America has loaded down with plants and insects, only for something, you know, unt it to befall them along the way. Either the insects would die or their life cycle would be interrupted by the travel or a well meaning crew member would destroy those pesky bugs with salt water. Once the insects finally did make it to India, which was really one of one of the places people were hoping they could take off, it was without a crop of cacti for them to live on. They wound up surviving on a similar species that already lived in India. But even so, the Indian cockneal industry really never managed to supplant the American one. India was producing four thousand pounds of the die a year by sevente seven, but pretty much everyone in Europe thought it was vastly inferior to the die that was coming from Central and South America and cockneal is still used today, and one of those uses is actually food die, which is a little bit chagrinning and disturbing to people who don't like the idea of eating bugs. Unless you are allergic to them, there is no health risk and having them in your food. Yeah, I kind of look at that as one of those whenever I have a food revelation about, oh, this is actually a gross thing you've been consuming, I'm like, well, I've consumed it for years, right, And cocknell is one of the many things that goes in that category. We also have a few fancy blues to talk about, and I think blue is your favorite color, isn't it It is. That's not why we're talking about more than one fancy blue though. Egyptian blue is the oldest man made blue die and the oldest man made die in general that we know of, as its name suggests. That got to start in Egypt about three thousand years ago with the combination of a lime, copper, oxide, and quartz, and once these were put into a kiln in the right proportions, they were fired down to a fine powder that could be made into paints and dies. And if you are confused because earlier we said that ochre was the oldest thing. You can pretty much make an ochre paint out of straight up ochre and something to moisten it with, and this was a much more deliberate combining of multiple ingredients to make a die. Ultramarine has also been around for a really long time. It is made from lapis lazuli, which was primarily mined in Afghanistan. Making ultramarine from lapis lazuli was an intensely manual process. Powdered mineral would have to be repeatedly needed with lie to ultimately make this die. There's some evidence that the Chinese had access to ultramarine as early as the eighth century b c. There are some very ancient glazed beads that modern analysis has shown to have been made with ultramarine. There are also other blue pigments used in the glaze, though, so it is possible that the ultramarine was accidentally synthesized thanks to impurities in the kiln. We do know for sure that by the sixth century CE, deliberately made ultramarine inks appear in Byzantine manuscripts. Its popularity really took off during the Middle Ages in Europe, and because so much time, labor, and travel was involved in its production and distribution, it was exorbitantly expensive. This is one of the reasons it was used with very particular significance and religious artwork. The Virgin Mary often wears ultramarine blue clothing in medieval art, and the cost and expense is also why the French Society for the Encouragement of National Industry announced a prize for whoever could make a cost effective synthetic ultramarine in eighteen twenty four. And cost effective here meant less than three hundred francs per kilogram. I got into some drama about who eventually claimed that prize because there were two two people who independently of one another, came up with the same basic process for synthetic ultramarine, and then is often the case, artists didn't want to use the synthetic synthetic one because they thought it wasn't as good as the real one. Hellette is a blue dye that's very important in the Jewish tradition. It was traditionally used to tie blue threads used in the tassels that are in the corners of prayer shawls. This color comes from the glands of a snail, most likely Heliplex trunculus, and at first the color that the snails secretions produces kind of a brownish yellow. But if you soak cotton in a vat of it sort of vat, dye this cotton and then let it air dry in the sun, it turns blue. Talent is mentioned repeatedly in the Torah, and often in the same context as precious materials like gold and silk. The dye was so religiously important that the methods for making it were a very closely guarded secret. This unfortunately meant that the knowledge of how to produce it was lost around the seventh century as Islamic people's moved into the Eastern Mediterranean. Modern scholars have managed to recreate how to produce this color, but there's still some debate about whether it's exactly the same as the ancient hue described in these texts. And before we talk about another die that was definitely made from snails, we will take a brief break to talk about a word from a sponsor, stupendous. So we've already talked about some totally cost effective, widely available ways to make purple, but in the Roman Empire, people got a little weird about purple, and one color purple in particular, as with tell It Tyrehne. Purple came from sea snails, specifically Balinus brand daris, previously known as Murix Brandaris, and this die was primarily made in the city of Tire in what is now Lemonon. Its height of popularity was during the time of the Roman Empire, and it's mentioned at least fifty times in the Christian Bible. When it's living, this snail secretes a slightly toxic mukee is that's part of how it kills its prey. And if you crack open its shell you can puncture the mucus gland and get out a drop of that mucus. When this drop of mucus is exposed to light, it progresses through several colors on the blue green end of the spectrum before winding up purple. It took twelve thousand snails to make enough die to die one Roman toga. Consequently, an enormous hill of discarded shells formed outside the city of Tire, and today this hill has actually become usable land. It's home to houses, businesses, there's a cemetery there, and it's actually known as Murex Hill. There are still broken snail shells all around its base. That astounding twelve thousand snails number is why purple dye, especially tyrehene purple dye, was so expensive and associated only with the very rich, but by the year four hundred it's popularity had also made these snaps. E was pretty hard to find, so it became illegal for anyone who wasn't actually part of the royal family to wear tyree and purple because it was just too scarce, and you know, the royal royalty didn't want to lose their purple that they were so fond of. Both both Emperors Nero and Theo ds Is the Second considered the wearing of tyreean purple by Nod royalty to be punishable by death. Following the end of the Roman Empire, the color fell out of favor and people went back to the old standbys of indigo and liken. This is one of those situations where you kind of look at what it took to make this purple and the fact that you could make purple other ways. It was really it's not like that was the only purple that existed. It was just the only one that was so rare that people got a little strange about how they they were emotionally invested in it. Yeah, color status becomes a whole sociological studiable thing at that point. So eventually people figured out how to make synthetic dies. William Henry Perkin was an English chemist. He was actually trying to synthesize quinine, which we've talked about before. It's used to treat malaria in eighteen fifty six, and he stumbled across something else entirely, which was mauve die. And he was making this substance and it was kind of black and gross looking, and then he realized as he looked at it that it was actually kind of a pretty color in spaces in different spaces. Um This came to be known as analygine purple and as mauvine, and it was the first truly synthetic die. Perkin then used his newly discovered chemical process to set up his own die factory, and once Queen Victoria wore a move dressed to her daughter's wedding, which was in eighteen fifty eight, Europe was almost instantly caught up in mauve madness. Perkin then turned his eye to all kinds of other colors, and he ended up becoming very, very rich, but he gave most of his profits away to charity. This didn't instantly put an end to natural dies. There are still plenty of natural diyes being used even today. Many artists and artisans really resisted the idea of using synthetic colors, and at first analine was also very expensive. But the availability of synthetic dies did really change the playing field significantly when it came to color. You know why I spend so much time and effort farming cockneal If you can just make it pretty synthetic red, that's basically the same shade. And today colors have lost some of the connotations that they carried in earlier parts of history, especially in the industrialized world. It's pretty common knowledge that in many parts of the world, blue and purple were the colors of royalty. But today you can get a blue sweater for the same price as a brown sweater. You don't have to pay extra for a royal purple crayon. And today people might use the colors you wear to judge your personality or your sense of taste. But in places where synthetic dies are readily available, that doesn't actually extend to your actual social class or net worth. Colors are democratized. Anybody can have them. Yeah, and I read a really interesting paper that was about Yeah, people pretty much now will judge your color literacy, like whether they think the combination of colors you're wearing our tacky or two showy or something like that. Um, but that doesn't actually translate to how much those colors cost or what your actual social status is. Yes, it'll be uh, you know, to borrow from Project Runway your taste level. That's discussed so much your social standing. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works in mail address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. 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