Purple

• 1. Introduction

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  Purple carries the weight of thousands of years of human longing and power. In antiquity, producing just a single gram of the color required the secretions of ten thousand sea snails, a labor so immense and costly that wearing purple became a statement no ordinary person could afford to make. What began as a dye extracted from the murex shell on the coast of ancient Phoenicia became a thread running through the coronations of emperors, the protests of suffragettes, the psychedelic songs of rock musicians, and the flags of nations. How did one color come to mean royalty in Rome, mourning in Victorian Britain, revolution in South Africa, and a swing vote in American politics? The answers stretch from the Neolithic caves of France all the way to the chemistry labs of 19th-century England, where a teenage student accidentally changed the world.

• 2. The Snail and the Dye

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  As early as the 15th century BC, the citizens of Sidon and Tyre on the coast of ancient Phoenicia were harvesting the spiny dye-murex snail from the Mediterranean to produce what became known as Tyrian purple. The process was exhausting and foul-smelling. Thousands of tiny snails had to be gathered, their shells cracked open, and a tiny gland removed. The extracted juice was then set out in a basin under sunlight, where it underwent a slow, remarkable transformation: white, then yellow-green, then green, then violet, then a deepening red. The process had to be stopped at precisely the right moment to achieve the desired shade, which could range from bright crimson to the dark color of dried blood.

  Mountains of empty shells have been found at the ancient sites of Sidon and Tyre, testament to the scale of the operation. The resulting dye was not merely colorful. It was rich, bright, and lasting in ways that other dyes of the era were not. Clothing made in Tyre appeared in the Iliad and the Aeneid. In 950 BC, King Solomon brought artisans from Tyre to provide purple fabrics for the Temple of Jerusalem. Alexander the Great wore Tyrian purple when giving imperial audiences as ruler of the Macedonian Empire.

  The Roman writer Vitruvius, writing in the 1st century BC, noted that murex shells from northern waters produced a more bluish color than those of the south. The most valued shades were those closest to dried blood, as preserved in the mosaics of the Emperor Justinian's robes in Ravenna. The chemical composition of Tyrian dye was close enough to indigo that indigo was sometimes used as a counterfeit, a crime that was severely punished. What mattered about Tyrian purple, as Vitruvius observed, was not merely its color but its luster, its richness, and its extraordinary price.

  When the German chemist Paul Friedlander attempted to recreate the ancient dye in 2008, he needed twelve thousand mollusks to produce just 1.4 ounces, enough to color a handkerchief. In the year 2000, a gram produced from ten thousand mollusks according to the original formula cost two thousand euros.

• 3. Emperors and Bishops

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  The Roman custom of wearing purple may have roots older than Rome itself. An Etruscan tomb painting from the 4th century BC shows a nobleman dressed in a deep purple embroidered toga, suggesting the association between purple and high status predates the Republic. Within Rome, the Toga praetexta, a white toga with a broad purple stripe, was worn by freeborn boys who had not yet come of age, by curule magistrates, and by certain priests. The Toga picta, solid purple embroidered with gold, was reserved for generals celebrating military triumphs and for the emperor on special occasions.

  Suetonius records that the early emperor Caligula had the King of Mauretania murdered for the splendor of his purple cloak. Nero forbade the use of certain purple dyes. By the late empire, the sale of purple cloth had become a state monopoly enforced by the death penalty. The Byzantine emperors continued this tradition with full intensity. Gospel manuscripts were written in gold lettering on parchment dyed Tyrian purple. Empresses gave birth in the Purple Chamber, and children born there were called "born to the purple," a phrase that marked them as legitimate heirs rather than those who won power through intrigue or force.

  Charlemagne was crowned in 800 wearing a mantle of Tyrian purple and was buried in 814 in a shroud of the same color, which still survives. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 ended the great dye works of Constantinople and with them the imperial color. By 1464, Pope Paul II decreed that cardinals should no longer wear Tyrian purple but scarlet instead, since the Byzantine supply had vanished. Bishops and archbishops, ranked below cardinals, were assigned purple, but not the rich Tyrian kind. Their cloth was dyed first with the cheaper indigo blue and then overlaid with red from kermes dye. Spirit Day, which began in 2010 to show support for young people bullied because of their sexual orientation, chose purple as its symbolic color, drawing on centuries of association with dignity and rank.

• 4. William Perkin's Accident

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  In 1856, an eighteen-year-old British chemistry student named William Henry Perkin was attempting to synthesize quinine. His experiments failed at that goal but produced something unexpected: the first synthetic aniline dye, a purple shade he called mauveine, shortened to mauve. The name came from the mallow flower, which shares the color.

  Perkin recognized what he had stumbled upon. He developed an industrial process, built a factory, and began producing the dye by the ton. Before his discovery, mauve was a color only the wealthy could afford. The moment that changed decisively came when Queen Victoria wore a silk gown dyed with mauveine to the Royal Exhibition of 1862. The color swept through fashionable society. Mauveine was the first of a series of modern industrial dyes that transformed both the chemical industry and the practice of fashion. The pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes, who was known for his love of bright colors and romantic scenes, was among those drawn to purple in this period.

  The story of synthetic purple did not stop with Perkin. Cobalt violet became the first modern synthetic color in the purple family, manufactured in 1859. It appeared in the palettes of Claude Monet, Paul Signac, and Georges Seurat, though it had low tinting power and proved expensive, so it fell out of use quickly. Manganese violet replaced it as a stronger option. Quinacridone violet, one of a modern synthetic organic family of colors, was first discovered in 1896 but not marketed until 1955. Today it is sold under numerous brand names and is used in oil paints, watercolors, acrylics, and industrial coatings including automobile finishes.

• 5. Protest and Politics

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  Purple carried political force well before it moved from court robes to demonstration banners. In the early 20th century, the Women's Suffrage movement in Britain and Ireland chose purple alongside white and green as its official colors, with purple standing for loyalty and dignity. The movement's struggle finally succeeded in the United States with the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. In the 1970s, as a tribute to the Suffragettes, purple became the color of the women's liberation movement.

  In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, prisoners who belonged to non-conformist religious groups, including the Jehovah's Witnesses, were required to wear a purple triangle to mark them out.

  On the 2nd of September 1989 in Cape Town, South Africa, a police water cannon loaded with purple dye sprayed thousands of demonstrators protesting apartheid in what became known as the Purple Rain Protest. The act of using the state's color against the crowd backfired, and the slogan The Purple Shall Govern emerged from the demonstration.

  In United States politics, a purple state refers to a state roughly balanced between Republicans, symbolized by red, and Democrats, symbolized by blue. In the Netherlands, the term purple describes a coalition government of liberals and social democrats, a combination used between 1994 and 2002 under Prime Minister Wim Kok. Belgium was governed by a similar purple arrangement from 1999 to 2007 under Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. Purple is also the primary color of Volt Europa, the UK Independence Party, the Social Democrats in Ireland, the Liberal People's Party in Norway, and the United States Pirate Party.

• 6. Purple in Sound and Sky

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  Jimi Hendrix released "Purple Haze" in 1967, a song that gave the color a new cultural home in the counterculture and psychedelic drug culture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The English rock band Deep Purple formed in 1968. In 1984, Prince released the song and album Purple Rain, adding another layer to the color's musical identity.

  George VI, who lived from 1896 to 1952, wore purple in his official portrait. The coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 featured the color prominently across every element, from the invitations to the stage design inside Westminster Abbey.

  The phenomenon of purple mountains has its own physical explanation. As the distance between an observer and a mountain range increases, light passes through more atmosphere at sunrise and sunset, scattering away green and blue wavelengths and allowing more red light to reach the eye. The result is a mountain range that appears purple. Leonardo da Vinci recognized this optical effect, known as aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective. The song "America the Beautiful" refers to "purple mountains' majesty." A Crayola crayon called Purple Mountain Majesty, created in reference to that lyric, was first formulated in 1993.

  In Chinese astronomy, the region surrounding the north celestial pole is called the Purple Forbidden Enclosure, and the Forbidden City in Beijing was also known as the Purple Forbidden City. In April 2007, researchers suggested that early archaea may have used retinal, a purple pigment, instead of chlorophyll to extract energy from sunlight. If that hypothesis holds, large areas of the ancient ocean and shoreline would have been colored purple, a theory now called the Purple Earth hypothesis.