The Palette/red/Taken from an animal
Lac
The Indian insect red that gave the English language the word 'lake' and gave furniture its shellac, from the same bug.
Also called lakh · laksha · Indian lake · shellac's other half
- Hex
- #9E3039
- RGB
- 158, 48, 57
- First used
- Ancient India; documented in Sanskrit texts
- From
- India, Thailand, Myanmar
What it is
Laccaic acids from the resinous secretion of Kerria lacca, a scale insect living on host trees.
How it is made
The insects encrust the twigs of host trees in a hard resin. The encrusted twigs (sticklac) are scraped off and washed; the wash water carries the red dye, and the washed resin is the raw material for shellac. One harvest, two products, and for most of history the dye was the valuable one and the resin was the by-product. That has completely reversed.
The dye water is precipitated with alum onto a base, exactly as with madder and cochineal. Sanskrit and Persian sources describe the process, and the Ain-i-Akbari mentions lac among the goods of the Mughal economy.
The history
The English word 'lake', as in a lake pigment, comes through Latin lacca from Sanskrit laksha, meaning a hundred thousand, a reference to the sheer number of insects on a twig. So the entire European technical vocabulary for precipitated dye pigments is borrowed from an Indian material. Worth knowing when a European handbook is presented as the origin of the technique.
Lac red was the great red of Indian and Persian painting for centuries, and it travelled: it is found in Mughal miniatures, Rajput painting, Persian manuscripts and, by trade, in European work too. Then cochineal arrived from the Americas with several times the tinting strength and took the market.
The insect is still farmed at scale in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, but now for shellac: French polish, sweet coatings, the shiny shell on a jelly bean, the sealing of an apple. The red has almost entirely lost to synthetics. A thousand-year-old dye industry survives as a varnish industry.
Where it is used
Indian and Persian painting, textile dyeing, alta (the red dye women paint on their feet in parts of India) and cosmetics. As shellac, still everywhere: wood finishing, electrical insulation historically, confectionery glaze, and the original gramophone record.
It is the best example of a supply chain quietly inverting. The by-product became the product. If you are building on a material because it is cheap, it is worth knowing why it is cheap. Sometimes you are buying somebody's waste stream, and waste streams stop when the main product does.
Go and look at it
Mughal miniature painting
V&A and British Library, London; National Museum, New Delhi
Deep transparent reds in robes and borders, often glazed over a warmer opaque red beneath.
Any French-polished antique
A junk shop
Shellac. Same insect, same harvest, the half nobody wanted.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Laccaic acids from the resinous secretion of Kerria lacca, a scale insect living on host trees.
- Opacity
- Transparent. It stains rather than covers, so it can be glazed over another colour.
- Lightfastness
- Moderate. It will move, noticeably, within decades, faster in thin films and tints.
- Lower tinting strength than cochineal, which is what lost it the market.
- pH-sensitive like most insect reds, shifts towards purple in alkali.
- The same harvest yields shellac, which is now the commercially important half.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #9E3039
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 158, 48, 57
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 355°, 53%, 40%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 0, 70, 64, 38
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 37, 46, 21
- Perceptual. L* of 37 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Lac is a substance. A ground mineral scatters light from thousands of separate grains at slightly different angles, and no single sRGB value is that event. It is a flat average of a photograph of it, and the real thing is outside what a screen can emit. Use the number to specify a screen colour. Do not use it to judge the pigment.
Where it sits on the wheel
Hue 355°
Its opposite, by the diagram
The arithmetic opposite, 180° round in HSL. Useful, and not the same as the opposite a painter mixing pigment would name, that wheel was built for paint.
Lighter and darker
Towards white
Mixing with white does not only lighten, it dulls and cools. This is why a pale tint of a brand colour so often looks chalky, and why a designed light shade beats a generated one.
Towards black
Mixing with black kills the hue as it darkens. A better dark is usually the colour plus its neighbour round the wheel, which is what every painter does instead.
Can you set type on it
Handgloves
White on it
7.15:1 · AAA
Handgloves
Black on it
2.94:1 · Fails
Handgloves
It on paper
6.79:1 · AA
Handgloves
It on ink
2.56:1 · Fails
4.5:1 is the floor for body text and 3:1 for large text, by WCAG. Treat it as a minimum you may not go under rather than as a target: plenty of pairs pass at 4.6:1 and are still unpleasant to read for a page, and the checker will not tell you that.
Watch
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Foundations · Colour·red·Taken from an animal