Halogenated versions of the dye were also created, and some like 5,5′-dibromoindigo were brought to market. Natural indigoids such as indigo, woad, and Tyrian or shellfish purple served this purpose for millennia, but in the late 1800s synthetic analogs, in particular indigotin, quickly replaced natural sources. People were killed for not following the law, and daring to have a hint of purple about them.The exploitation of natural sources and later synthetic molecules to generate blue to purple coloration in textiles has a long history in the dyer’s craft. Purple was in fact, so sought after, such an obvious message to other lowly people that you were rich and important, that laws were introduced to protect its use. Some might call it violet, or mauve, but whatever you call it, it is the most refracted colour when light is passed through a prism at the very end of the visible colour spectrum and the hardest colour for the eye to discriminate. On the colour wheel, purple sits between blue and red. We talk of reds as vibrant and bold, blues as calming, oranges as zesty. Not like pink, which can so easily be swallowed up by additions of powder, candy or girlie. No matter what other moniker it has been married with over the years – rain or deep for example – it overpowers any suffix or prefix to be absolutely itself. Perhaps you’re beginning to see why purple is the coolest of colours, steeped in mythology, legend, history and … mucous.

The Roman author Pliny the Elder, not easily swayed by the fashion for purple, wondered what all the fuss was about, declaring it a “dye with an offensive smell”. The vats used to make purple sat right on the edge of the town, because the process was a stinky one. Amazingly, given how many were needed to sate the appetite of emperors and kings, they didn’t become extinct. Tyre, in what is now Lebanon, was a Phoenician city on the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea where the sea snails (still) live. Mythology states that it was Hercules himself who discovered it – or rather, his dog did, after picking up a murex off the beach and developing purple drool. Tyrian purple was made from the mucous of sea snails – or muricidae, more commonly called murex – and an incredible amount was needed to yield just a tiny amount of dye. The innocent murex (Bolinus brandaris) trying to look as un-purple as possible.

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