The Palette/purple/Made in a lab or a works
Mauveine
An eighteen-year-old failed to synthesise a malaria drug, got a purple sludge instead, and accidentally started the chemical industry.
Also called aniline purple · Perkin's mauve · Tyrian purple (as Perkin marketed it)
- Hex
- #7F3F98
- RGB
- 127, 63, 152
- First used
- 1856
- From
- A home laboratory in Cable Street, east London
What it is
A mixture of related aniline compounds, chiefly mauveine A and B, from oxidising impure aniline.
How it is made
William Henry Perkin, eighteen, was trying to make quinine from coal-tar aniline over the Easter holiday of 1856. A reasonable goal and, as it turns out, chemically hopeless with the understanding of the time. Oxidising his impure aniline with potassium dichromate gave a black tarry mess. Cleaning the flask with alcohol turned the alcohol brilliant purple.
The important part is what he did next. He tested it on silk, found it dyed well and held its colour, wrote to a dye works in Perth, got an encouraging reply, filed a patent, dropped out of the Royal College of Chemistry against his professor's advice, and had his father and brother help him build a factory at Greenford by the following year. He was nineteen.
The synthesis needs aniline as a starting material, and aniline comes from coal tar, and coal tar was an industrial waste product that gasworks were struggling to get rid of. A rubbish stream turned into a luxury good.
Mauveine, Synthetic dye. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
Purple had been the most expensive colour in the world for three thousand years. Within a few years of 1856 it was cheap, and by the early 1860s it was a mass fashion. Queen Victoria wore it to the Royal Exhibition, Empress Eugénie decided it matched her eyes, and Punch ran jokes about 'mauve measles' spreading through London.
The consequences are far larger than the colour. Mauveine proved that valuable substances could be built from coal tar, which produced the synthetic dye industry, which produced BASF, Bayer and Hoechst, which produced the modern pharmaceutical industry. Bayer was a dye company first. It also gave biology its stains: Gram staining, and Koch's and Ehrlich's work on bacteria, depended on aniline dyes, and Ehrlich's chemotherapy idea came straight out of thinking about dyes that bind selectively to tissue.
The colour itself did not last long in fashion. It was out by the late 1860s, as fashions are. What is worth sitting with is how fast it destroyed a three-thousand-year-old meaning. Purple as the emperor's colour survived Rome, Byzantium and every medieval sumptuary law, and did not survive a teenager with a dirty flask.
Where it is used
Silk and cotton dyeing, ribbons, dresses, and one famous set of postage stamps. Now historical, mauveine is not a commercial dye any more, having been replaced by better synthetics within decades.
The lesson for anyone building on a colour is unflattering and useful: colour meanings that rest on cost collapse when the cost collapses. If your brand's claim to premium is a colour, the claim has the durability of the manufacturing situation that makes that colour expensive, which today is approximately zero.
Go and look at it
Perkin's original sample and dyed silks
Science Museum, London
A sealed tube of the actual sludge. The curator's account is in the film below.
The 1856 patent and the Greenford works site
London
Nineteen years old, from bedroom flask to factory in about eighteen months.
How it behaves
- Made of
- A mixture of related aniline compounds, chiefly mauveine A and B, from oxidising impure aniline.
- 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.
- Fades in strong light, which is why surviving mauveine-dyed dresses are duller than the originals.
- The first of the aniline dyes; the industry it started replaced it within thirty years.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #7F3F98
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 127, 63, 152
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 283°, 41%, 42%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 16, 59, 0, 40
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 38, 43, -38
- Perceptual. L* of 38 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Mauveine 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 283°
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
6.85:1 · AA
Handgloves
Black on it
3.07:1 · Large text only
Handgloves
It on paper
6.50:1 · AA
Handgloves
It on ink
2.67:1 · 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.
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Foundations · Colour·purple·Made in a lab or a works