Color and chemistry

Dyes are thought to predate clothing. The earliest indication of human interest in color is the preponderance of green and pink pebble tools produced by the Oldowan toolmakers. The Terra Amata Homo erectus site on the French Riviera, dated a million and a half years after the time of Oldowan tools, is littered with pieces of the mineral pigment ocher in its yellow, brown, red, and purple forms.

A couple of hundred thousand years later, Neandertals dyed dead relatives with red ocher before burial, suggesting that the Neandertals painted, dyed, or otherwise decorated their own bodies while alive. The root of the madder plant produces a red dye that was used for dying cloth used to wrap some Egyptian mummies. By early classical times, the Phoenicians had discovered that a Mediterranean shellfish produces a deep purple dye; in one of the early marketing successes, they arranged for the dye--royal purple--to be used only in fabrics worn by rulers. Naturally, everyone wanted it. Roman sources report that people in Great Britain used the plant woad to dye themselves blue. In the 16th century, Europeans learned that Native Americans were fond of a bright red dye from a cactus fly; both dye and fly are called cochineal.

Minerals, plants, shellfish, and insects continued in use by households and fabric manufacturers without much scientific investigation. Cornelius Drebbel, in addition to submarines and engineering works, developed in the mid-17th century a way to improve cochineal scarlet with tin and set off one of the first international fashion statements since royal purple. Thereafter, both the English and the French pursued the matter of dyestuffs and issued various handbooks and studies.

Dyes became big business in the mid-19th century with fast (nonfading) ones from coal tar. Most dyeing development was done by Germans (some while in England). This led to the great German work with organic chemistry. As colors like William Perkin's mauve and magenta, a French imitation of German fuchsin, were introduced, they swept through the fashion world--as shocking pink did in the 1930s and again in the 1950s.

Dyes work differently from pigments because dyes chemically bond with fibers. It is not surprising that dyes effective for wool, cotton, and flax also bond with parts of living creatures. German medical workers, notably Paul Ehrlich, borrowed dyes and chemistry from the fabric industry to begin the era of chemical medicine. Their artificial remedies replaced and surpassed the herbal ones just as a few decades earlier artificial coloring replaced ancient herbs.