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Mellow Yellow and True Blue: Colorful Dye Books at CHF Bookmark and Share Bookmark & share  

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Colors are a celebration of life. Newborn babies are dressed in blues and pinks, Indian wedding saris exude colorful joy, and current fashion always declares some color or other to be the new black. However, for a long time in the history of clothed man, it was not easy being green (or red or black or blue).

With the advent of synthetic dyes in the mid-nineteenth century, fashion truly exploded in color, and companies producing the brilliant hues published an uncounted number of books for their potential customers. Many of these trade catalogs for dyes are now housed at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's Othmer Library, together with books on the chemistry behind synthetic dye stuffs.

More information about individual dye catalogs, along with images of their wonderfully colorful swatches, feathers, and threads, and may be found in the slide show.

Bleeding out: early dyes
In the Middle Ages the poor could not afford to buy brightly colored, dyed cloth. While they made do with natural browns and grays, their richer contemporaries sported yellow (dyed with the expensive spice saffron), red (made by drying and crushing lice, which still lend some red lipsticks their color today), blue (made with the exotic indigo plant) and green clothes (often mixed together from yellow and blue dyes).

However, wearing colors was hazardous: the dyes would wash out in the rain and bleach to an unappealing shade when exposed to sun. Thus mourners in medieval times wore white rather than black, as black was one of the most difficult colors to mix and fix on a fabric. The production of dyes with variable vegetable or animal ingredients was tricky, too, and many dyers devoted all their experience to a specific color: a reliable red often attracted customers from far and wide.

wool
A color available for wool dyeing in the early twentieth century

What’s in a color?
The question of how it is possible for our eyes to see colors occupied philosophers for a long time. When Robert Boyle, famous natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, heard of a blind Dutchman who could distinguish the colors of otherwise identical cloth ribbons by touch, he hypothesized that the particles that make up the dyes (something Boyle called corpuscles) were "asperous" to different degrees, i.e., rough for some colors, and smooth for others. Another possibility, according to Boyle, was that the blind man had a particularly fine nose and identified dyes by their smell.

Most of Boyle's contemporaries, however, were interested in a different question: how to make dyes that penetrated cloth well and stayed on it permanently. In the eighteenth century, several acids and other improved dyes entered the market, but they would pale before the invention of synthetic colors in the mid-nineteenth century.

“Mauve is just pink trying to be purple”
The artist James McNeill Whistler had a point with this remark about a previously unknown, luminous color, which must have seemed to the eye of the 1850s as outrageous as neon colors did in the 1980s. This new color was the first synthetic dye stuff, aniline purple, named mauve after the French word for the mallow flower.

In the 1860s and 1870s, the ever-increasing number of synthetic dyes was said to rival nature in its beauty. Fashion crazes now revolved around color – a constant trend which eventually made it possible for Coco Chanel to create the Little Black Dress with truly black fabrics in 1926.

The Aldine Device

Color me colorful
By the turn of the twentieth century, chemists had seen great success with manufacturing dyes for all sorts of materials, from corduroy to cotton, wool to feathers. They had also figured out how to prepare cloth and dyes for various printing techniques, so that the colors would not run into each other and stay permanent on the cloth. Colors could now be produced and reproduced in so many hues and shades that the unreliable and comparatively pasty results of early plant dyeing seemed like a bad dream of the past. And indeed, the problem of keeping a color fast on a fabric and resistant to fading was resolved so successfully that the surviving dye sample books explode with all colors of the rainbow.

Bibliography

The books listed below were kindly donated by the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists in 2000.

  • Wladimir Triapkine, Roneage du rouge turc par la méthode alcaline (Paris, 1899)
  • Farbenfabriken Bayer Aktiengesellschaft, The mordant dyestuffs of the farbenfabriken vorm. Friedr. Bayer & Co., Elberfeld, and their application to printing and dyeing (New York, 1902)
  • Textile color card association of the United States, To His Majesty King Edward VIII, and in commemoration of his coronation, May twelfth, nineteen hundred and thirty seven (1936)
  • Farbwerke vorm. Meister Lucius & Brüning, The coal tar colours of Farbwerke vorm. Meister Lucius & Brüning, Hoechst on Main, Germany, applied in calico printing (New York, 1908)
  • Bayer Company, Inc., Ausfärbungen auf Federn = Shades on Feathers = Teintures sur Plumesi (New York, n.d.)
  • J. R. Geigy A.G., Nuances mode sur chapeaux de laine = Fashion shades on wool hats = Modenuancen für Wollhüte (Switzerland, n.d.)
  • Bayer Company, Inc., Färbungen auf Cords und Sammt = Shades on Corduroy and Velveteen = Nuances sur velours et velours à côtes (New York, n.d.)
  • Bayer Company, Inc., Farben für Spritlacke = Colours for spirit lakes = Couleurs pour laques à l'alcool (New York, n.d.)

View other related items in the Othmer Library catalog