In the ancient world, the color purple was a sign of royalty. Anything dyed the color of Tyrian purple was instantly precious, because the dye was so labor-intensive and the source of the color was so tiny. The expense itself made purple a status symbol. Wearing it was an example of conspicuous consumption, in that it was a signal to others of what one could afford. And that was about all that Tyrian purple had going for it, because wearing out wasn’t all that pleasant.
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
Purple is a paradox, a contradiction of a colour. Associated since antiquity with regality, luxuriance, and the loftiness of intellectual and spiritual ideals, purple was, for many millennia, chiefly distilled from a dehydrated mucous gland of molluscs that lies just behind the rectum: the bottom of the bottom-feeders. That insalubrious process, undertaken since at least the 16th Century BC (and perhaps first in Phoenicia, a name that means, literally, ‘purple land’), was notoriously malodorous and required an impervious sniffer and a strong stomach. Though purple may have symbolised a higher order, it reeked of a lower ordure.
It took tens of thousands of desiccated hypobranchial glands, wrenched from the calcified coils of spiny murex sea snails before being dried and boiled, to colour even a single small swatch of fabric, whose fibres, long after staining, retained the stench of the invertebrate’s marine excretions. Unlike other textile colours, whose lustre faded rapidly, Tyrian purple (so-called after the Phoenician city that honed its harvesting) only intensified with weathering and wear – a miraculous quality that commanded an exorbitant price, exceeding the pigment’s weight in precious metals.
Read the history of Tyrian purple dye at BBC Culture. -via Metafilter
Source: neatorama