Purple for the Priviledged

Murex Brandaris

For centuries, the color purple was both an elusive and exclusive hue. From the time of Ceasar till the conclusion of the Byzantine Empire, purple was worn by kings and those serving in a high office or positions of influence. Rulers like Nero would sentence anyone to death who dared to wear imperial purple. The Roman emperor Diocletain however, took a more economical approach by collecting taxes from anyone who was compelled to slip on the hue.

Up until the 1850’s, the arduous process of acquiring this color was more involved then its close cousin—red. Not unlike red, purple was also derived from the animal kingdom. Farmed from the Mediterranean region by the Phonecians as far back as 1500 B.C., Tyrian Purple came from the mucous secretion of a predatory sea snail’s hypobranchial gland (murex brandaris, murex trunculus, bolinus brandaris).

The sea snails were soaked and then boiled in large vats which allowed the “juice” to be removed from the gland. It took approximately 250,000 snails to extract half an ounce of dye—just enough to dye one toga.

If you go to the town of Tyre today (a southern port in Lebanon and where Tyrian Purple gets its name), you can still find the original stone vats as large as dinner tables where the snails were processed. Located on the edge of town, one can only imagine the horrible smell of rotten shellfish that permeated the area. The naturalist Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus) visited the city to observe and record the extraction and dying methods. Noted in his scholarly work, Natural History he commented on how garments dyed with Tyrian Purple had the distinctive and offensive aroma of fish. Unfortunately Pliny was unsuccessful in accurately recording the extraction and dying methods. Most of the steps proved to be more detailed than he realized, and in some cases were trade secrets.

Rock snail being poked in order to release drops of dye. Once it is
finished being “milked” it will be released into the water.

The acquisition of purple from sea snails wasn't exclusive to the Mediterranean region. On the coasts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, dyers of Nicoya also used shellfish to produce the color. Using some methods that (if done correctly) would keep the animal alive, the widemouthed rock snail (pilcopurpure pansa) could be squeezed to force it to vomit the dye in very small amounts.

These methods did not produce a dye was as vibrant, long-lasting or consistent by today’s standards. The type of mordant used to fix the dye varied which caused a variety of hues that ranged from blue-red, deep crimson to a bright pink.

Though the color survived in name, the ancient manufacturing processes (lost prior to the storming of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Empire) did not, by the ninth century. Imperial purple was no longer sought by the influential, and the need to retain this manufacturing steps were lost.

Fashion plate from 1860 showing a woman in
purple silk crinoline, Victoria & Albert Museum.

In 1856 purple’s popularity was resurrected by William Henry Perkin. Working on an experiment to find an alternative to quinine (a remedy for malaria) Perkin made a decision to not toss out leftover coal tar residue found in a glass flask. He later discovered that this substance possessed excellent dyeing properties.

Perkin chose to call his color mauveine (also known as mauve or aniline purple) and the field of chemistry, fashion, pharmaceutical and commercial enterprises benefited.

Mauve ushered in a reappearance of purple again by the wealthy, powerful, and fashionable across Europe. Anyone from Queen Victoria (who wore the color at her daughter's wedding) to those who had the means to acquire it, wore mauve in 1858. Perkin opened a dye factory not far from London in 1857. By his twenty-first birthday he had managed to become extremely wealthy while possibly saving what remained of a specific species of snails from extinction. Who could have imagined this was the result of saving some gooey stuff that Perkin found to be a “ ...strangely beautiful color.”1

1. The Little Rock Gazette, quoted in Garfiled, Mauve.