Recent synthetic dyes have also caused a stir. Perkins was a rich man by 21, before mauve fell out of favor with the fashionable set. Unable to recreate his success, Perkins lost his fortune in just over a decade. He would call this, the first mass-produced synthetic dye, Mauveine, an “eye-wateringly vibrant purple” that became all the rage in fashion. In 1865, an English teenager named William Henry Perkin accidentally discovered a synthetic dye in his home laboratory during the school Easter holidays. Purple was there at the start of the modern dyeing boom. The recipe for Pliny’s Purple, written by Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder and dated to 77CE, calls for 160,000 deveined molluscs caught from the Mediterranean Sea. Historic instructions for coveted hues show how audacious the pursuit of color can get. Another Roman Emperor, the notoriously wanton Caligula, is said to have not taken kindly when Ptolemy, king of Mauretania, wore a purple cloak during a visit and, according to Roman historian Suetonis, had Ptolemy killed. Julius Caesar decreed that only he could wear the finest specimens of the color. Long the color of nobility and the rich, purple is one of the most difficult natural dyes to achieve. In the past, purple has also been produced from sea creatures, notably murex snails. The use of cochineal dates to between 300 BCE and 200 BCE it takes about 70,000 dried bugs (the size of a “grain of rice”) to make a pound of dye powder - enough to turn “13 wool sweaters a bright cardinal red.” At the apex of the red spectrum sits cochineal, a deep crimson shade MacDonald calls “the most prestigious” natural red dye, made from the parasitic insect of the same name. Over the centuries many popular colors have been made from insects and invertebrates.
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