Colour: a human history | HistoryExtra
"‘Yellow has particularly contradictory connotations, because on the one hand, certain times in certain places yellow was deeply revered. It was the color of the Sun and the color of gold. It was the color of you know, splendid joy and it was bright and it was uplifting. But in other times and other places, yellow was seen as am as a dirty color, as an unwanted color. And so in Europe in particular, but also to some extent in the Middle East and Islamic societies, yellow was used to taint, to mark out individuals who were unwanted or disapproved of, because yellow was seen as dirty, because yellow can seem like a slightly dirty form of white.
And partly because it was very bright and easily seen, it would be used to mark out prostitutes, heretics, criminals, Jews… through the Middle Ages, Jews often had to wear yellow hats. But sometimes there will be badges as well. And of course, the Nazis made Jews wear a yellow star… And we see it in art as well. I mean, you think of, for instance of the great paintings by Giotto, Judas, in many artists’ work was often shown wearing a yellow outfit, and that would have immediately been understood by contemporaries in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance as Oh, he's the baddie because he's wearing yellow. So it had all these meanings, some of which have faded from view, some of which are still going...
In almost every language we know of blue is very late to be named. So most languages start with words for black and white, then they develop a word for red, then they develop a word for yellow followed by green, or green, followed by yellow… Homer’s great, great poems. In Ancient Greece, they hardly ever use a stable secure word for blue. And I think the reason is, I mean, no one really knows for certain, but my theory is the reason is the reason that blue comes so late, isn't actually despite, as you say, the sky being blue, and the sea looking blue, and the horizon looking blue. There are very few tangible, blue things in our world, at least before we're able to create blue pigments and dyes. You don't see many blue fruits, you don't see many blue animals, you don't see many blue stones’...
‘The Romantics certainly were rather big champions of the color blue. Why did blue become the quintessential romantic color?’
‘Well, I think partly because of the things I've described, I think the Romantics liked things they couldn't really get their hands on. They liked things that were mysterious. They liked things that were, that were stayed at a distance. They liked things that you could yearn for, but you could never quite reach and blue had all of those qualities in the bucket load. You know, because you could never touch the blueness of the sky, you could never touch the blueness of the sea, you could never reach the blueness of the horizon. And so blue became this perfect metaphor, romantic metaphor for the things we want the things we can see, but the things we can't actually have. And I think that remains one of the reasons why we love blue today. In fact, there are surveys, survey after survey shows, even today, that blue is by far the world's favorite color. Almost every country in the world, the surveys reveal that blue is people's favorite color. And often by a long way, it's often 30 to 40% of a given population, choose blue as their number one color.’...
‘One of the first great purple color dyes was Tyrian purple… you have to collect all these sea snails from from the from the Mediterranean. You had to then take out the mucus from one of their glands. You then had to boil that up for two weeks in some vat. The smell was disgusting, but you needed a lot of these sea snails. You needed somewhere in the region of nine or 10,000 simply to make a gram of this dye. So this purple that it produced became extremely expensive, so expensive that really no one could afford it. And in fact, there's a wonderful early fourth century price list Roman price list that lists all the different commodities then available in the empire, the prices and Tyrian, purple silk. So this particular form of purple silk was the joint most expensive product you could buy, was 75 times more expensive than saffron, it was twice as expensive as gold. It was, I think, twice as expensive as buying a slave, there was only one other item on the whole price list that was as expensive as just a pound of purple silk. And that was a lion, if you wanted to buy a lion, a male lion from Africa… if you asked a normal laborer based on his salary to to buy a pound of purple silk, I worked out that it would take him 24 years of non stop work to save the money to buy that’...
‘With the rise of chemists purple went from being something that was completely out of the reach of most people to something that the upper classes and the middle classes could afford and could wear. And there's something that is wonderfully called mauve mania that spreads across the UK and purple becomes this global sensation.’...
‘What's seen as the first great, hugely successful synthetic dye was a dye called mauve. This was a purple created by an 18 year old boy called William Henry Perkin, who was, discovered it really by accident in his spare bedroom in Shadwell. And he created this stunning purple color that had a similar shade to some of the best Tyrian purple and went into manufacturing it I think in 1857, and it became a huge phenomenon. And throughout the late 1850s and into the early 1860s. Everyone who was anyone wanted to wear purple. So you know Queen Victoria wore purple and aristocratic balls wore purple and men wore purple ties to the office and children started wearing purple school uniforms. Purple went everywhere. And it did become much more affordable, much more affordable than the ancient purples. And so lots of people could wear it. We even ended up having purple stamps, postage stamps. And so you know, it's funny when you when we think back of the past, particularly if we think back to the Victorian era, we always think of the past has been less colorful than the present. We always think it's going to be slightly black and white or gray because that's we see it through black and white photographs or sepia photographs. But actually, if you went back to London, in the 1850s and 60s, you would be just inundated with bright purple, and indeed lots of other bright colors as well that have all been generated by synthetic chemistry.’...
‘Green as a virtue as a product of its connections to fertility and, and vegetation and spring and new life becomes a really quite positive color in many different cultures. We see it in, in ancient Egypt, we see it in China, we see it in South America. Perhaps the most famous embraces of of green as a color were the people of the Islamic faith. And I think there's no coincidence that these are a group of people who emerge in a very arid part of the world where green vegetation is quite scarce and where green vegetation is therefore really treasured. So we know for instance, that Muhammad, his favorite color was green, he likes wearing green, he talked about leaves all the time. We know that the Quran talks a lot about about the beauty of leaves and plants being, being rained on, for instance, and the power of the rains. We know that the Quran talks about Paradise itself as being green in some ways. You know, the, the Islamic paradise is quite similar to the Christian and Jewish Eden. But one of the big differences is they explicitly link it to green. They say that people are wearing green clothes there, they're reclining on green cushions. And in fact, the shortest verse in the Quran, in the whole Koran is just one word. And that word means green. It's a particular kind of dark green, of the trees and the leaves that can be found in Paradise. And so so green has particularly positive connotations in the Islamic world because it's associated with faith, with being blessed by God because the rain is coming down and feeding everything. And it's also associated with the afterlife and renewal’"
