Mushrooms, snails and plant roots: The surprising story of how your clothes got their color

By Ananda Pellerin, CNN

(CNN) — Madder, cochineal, Mauveine; these words may be unfamiliar but they’re the names of dyes made from a plant, an insect and a chemical that have shaped our world.

While indigo is arguably the most recognized dye — the plant which colored King Tutankhamun’s burial shrouds and more recently makes your denim blue — there are dozens of other dyestuffs that have incited murder and subterfuge, made and lost fortunes and turned clothes into a status symbol for thousands of years.

In a new book exploring the history of dyes, author and textile designer Lauren MacDonald weaves together the stories and science of color dating from pre-history to today; from the time of natural dyeing to modern synthetic production.

“It’s been (at least) 26,000 years since humans started to dye,” the author writes. “Your great grandparents (999 removed) were stirring a bubbling vat of dye… while woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats roamed the earth.” Indeed, in 2009, scientists found fibers of dyed flax up to 34,000 years old in a cave in the Caucasus mountains in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Get madder

The earliest sample of dye made from madder, an herb plant with lemon-red flowers, was found on a mummy in the remote Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, probably one of the last areas settled by humans. Dated to around 300CE, Yingpan Man the mummy is cloaked in a kaftan of scarlet wool lined with red silk dyed with madder, in a style that hints at Greek, Persian and Chinese influences; proof of the extensive trade routes that existed at the time.

A common source of red dye dating back 4,000 years, madder doesn’t produce the reddest red (that award goes to dyes made from insects, including cochineal and kermes), but it still prompted European textile firms to send spies to Turkey from the 15th century onwards, to glean the secrets to creating a colorfast madder red.

Meanwhile in the 13th-century Italian city-state of Lucca, dyers protected their livelihoods with ferocious laws. If you were caught using an “inferior” red dye made from roots like madder, instead of crushed bugs like kermes, you risked losing your savings — or one of your hands.

Like many dyes, the process for coloring with madder is lengthy, unsavory, and dangerous— making it unfit for the faint of heart (or nostril). According to an 1871 issue of “Scientific American” magazine, there are 11 steps needed to dye wool with madder. MacDonald reports it calls for yarns to be soaked in “weak soda lye, then rinsed in a river. Next, sheep dung is plunged into a soda solution, mixed with olive oil, strained and then combed through the yarn” to get rid of lumps. “The larger the sheep dung/ olive oil lump, the more likely it is that the mixture will catch fire.”

Sea change

Not all natural dyes come from plants. Over the centuries many popular colors have been made from insects and invertebrates. 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. 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.”

In the past, purple has also been produced from sea creatures, notably murex snails. Long the color of nobility and the rich, purple is one of the most difficult natural dyes to achieve. Julius Caesar decreed that only he could wear the finest specimens of the color. 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.

Historic instructions for coveted hues show how audacious the pursuit of color can get. 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.

Colorful future

Purple was there at the start of the modern dyeing boom. In 1865, an English teenager named William Henry Perkin accidentally discovered a synthetic dye in his home laboratory during the school Easter holidays. He would call this, the first mass-produced synthetic dye, Mauveine, an “eye-wateringly vibrant purple” that became all the rage in fashion. 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.

Recent synthetic dyes have also caused a stir. In 2017, blue dogs were found in a river in Mumbai downstream from a paint and plastics factory (a video of the dogs went viral, largely because it highlighted the environmental implications of dumped industrial dyes). But concerns about the impacts of dyeing aren’t new. The book tells the story of Friedrich Goppelsröder, a 19th-century civil servant in Switzerland who exposed factory owner Johann Jakob Müller-Pack, for the careless disposal of arsenic used to make synthetic magenta which was poisoning the town of Basel through its water supply. His campaign led to a ban on arsenic dumping.

Dangerous chemical plant processes persist to this day, and overconsumption is an huge issue. According to the Global Fashion Agenda’s Pulse of the Industry Report, the total level of fashion waste forecast for 2030 is 148 million tons and the vast majority of clothing waste ends up in landfills or is incinerated (the equivalent to a rubbish truck full of clothes is dumped in landfill every second). Globally, only 20% of clothing is collected for reuse or recycling.

And while headway is being made with innovative practices like water treatment using  contaminant-absorbing mushrooms, and genetic engineering that shifts the DNA of fabrics to require no dye, chemical color is still big business and synthetic dyestuffs are ubiquitous. As MacDonald reminds us, “Textiles surround us almost every moment of our lives—from the crisp cotton sheets we tuck ourselves into at night to the uniforms we don for our daily work…”  The history, the present and future of dyeing is inextricably linked with how we live our lives.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

The author Ananda Pellerin was an editor on The Pursuit of Color. The book is published by Atelier Éditions, and out now.