As a web developer, I often have to do a bit of colour magic. Thank goodness it’s not very difficult. I change a line or two in a file, save the file, and there you go: the colour on the screen changes magically. It’s so easy, it’s amazing.
Has colour always been that easy? Certainly not. So let’s get a bit nostalgic and remind ourselves of the good old times when colouring stuff was still a true health and safety hazard. From plain weird to downright deadly, 5 pigments to remember. (And forget...)
Heavily dosed with arsenic, this one started its career as a rodent killer in the Parisian sewage system – hence the name – before expanding into the insecticide market. As you would expect, it is highly toxic and, surprise! degrades into a gas with time. But it has a nice, fresh, soothing green colour, so impressionists like Monet and Renoir got hooked.
Interior designers also quickly jumped on the bandwagon, leading to an unexpected surge of poisonous wallpaper and arsenic fumes inside 19th century homes.
Early vermilion was ground from a bright red stone with an enchanting name: cinnabar. As usual, reality turned out to be slightly less enchanting for those mining it, since they were actually mining mercury all day long. It didn't stop anyone though. Eventually, alchemists discovered how to synthesise the pigment by mixing sulfur and mercury together.
Throughout 10'000 years of vermilion history, the pigment has featured literally everywhere: in prehistorical art, on pre-Columbian monuments and graves, in Roman houses, on Chinese palaces, temples and lacquerware, in medieval manuscripts and on Renaissance canvasses, on Venetian cheeks and on Indian foreheads, and even in food. No comment.
This mania probably killed quite a few people along the way, so it is safe to assume that humanity really likes red.
Known since Antiquity, white lead was all over art history until the rise of titanium white, around 1920. Painters loved its vibrancy and when you love something, you don't care if it's trying to kill you.
Aside from art, white lead got used on the hulls of English ships and on the faces of Venetian beauties, which couldn't have been very beneficial. The ships benefited from the treatment more than the Venetians, as the paint waterproofed the wood and protected it from worms. The Venetians died early.
White lead has a few other pretty names, such as Venetian ceruse and spirits of Saturn. We still refer to lead poisoning as saturnism.
Yellowcake = powdered uranium. Yes, for real. Do I need to say any more? While yellowcake is still in use for safer things, such as atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, it also enjoyed a stint in the world of ceramics, where the stunning yellow glazes didn't pass unnoticed. It then got banned, apparently more because of the radioactive glow of the word uranium than because of the actual radiation levels.
You know when you have that bunch of cows, but milk production is, like, too mainstream for you, so you decide to put your cows on a diet of organic vegan fair-trade mango leaves and collect their urine to produce a dark yellow pigment? That's right bitch, that's how you make Indian yellow.
One thing they will never take away from us, as a species we are damn creative.