Author Kassia St. Clair takes a look into the marvelous world of The Secret Lives of Color.
The Secret Lives of Colors by Kassia St. Clair explores the universe of pigments, dyes and hues. More specifically, it delves into a palette of 75 shades, the history behind them, their associations with particular artists, designers or brands while giving us readers a taste of the unfathomable.
"Colors, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream."
Stories behind the palette
The layout of the book allows us to scroll through the shades as we marvel at the secrets behind colors. Silver for example was the metal that was thought to detect poison by changing color and was used for tableware. Mountbatten pink was the color given to the ships' hulls to better camouflage themselves. Western wedding gowns used to be colorful until Queen Victoria wore ivory satin trimmed with British lace in 1840 (a selection also made by The Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, for her wedding).
All the curiosities hidden in the hues that surround us cam help us explain certain origins and functions.
Perhaps you never heard of "isabelline" or the story behind it: while Archduke Albert VII of Austria was at the siege of Ostend (1601) his wife Isabella vowed she would not change or wash her underwear until her husband´s return. Three years later, the yellowish color of the queen's linens corresponded to 'isabelline'" and today "Isabellinism is also the name of a genetic mutation that renders feathers that ought to be black, gray, or dark brown a pallid yellowish color instead."
Exploring some of the history behind the colors, we find Puce is said to have acquired its name from the anecdote that right before the French Revolution. When Marie Antoinette (fond of fashionable silk taffetas) was found by her husband trying a new color, he exclaimed upset that it resembled the couleur de puce - the color of fleas. Bearer of a mighty name, Heliotrope, signified devotion in the Victorian language of flowers and was popular for women to wear after the death of a loved one. While during the English Reformation, churches and parishioners used whitewash color to act as a moral and spiritual cleansing and obscure colorful murals and altarpieces that depicted impious saints. The expression "to whitewash" might have taken its origin here.
The book exposes dangerous hues such as Scheele's green, which rendered rich arsenic fabrics and wallpapers in the 18th and 19th centuries, enough to poison the people living within the green walls and wearing the dyed dresses. Lead white color on the other hand, became popular as an unwholesome paste mixed with vinegar to use as foundation, some have implied that breast-feeding infants were ingesting lead worn by their mothers.
The relationship between color and cosmetics is long-standing. An extraordinary fact about Egyptian make up is that the chemicals found in Kohl, stimulated the skin around the eye "to produce around 240 percent more nitric oxide than usual, significantly reducing the risk of eye infections". Amazing if we think what we expect of make-up products today. It might also sound surprising that not a long time ago there was a color called "mummy" and yes, it was made from grinding up real mummies to make the pigment.
If we think about previous decades, the fashion colors that came to mind when dressing children usually identify with the pink-girl / blue-boy divide which dates from the mid-twentieth century. But before this division was established in our society, usually blue was given to girls and pink to boys as pink was considered stronger and decided, and blue more delicate.
Symbols of luxury and power
When thinking about famous luxury brands, colors tend to be a decisive factor to identify them. But Hermès color choice of orange came from nothing less than paint shortage caused by the Second World War. The signature color of the house had been cream at first, then mustard and finally orange, the last paperboard color available. Enzo Ferrari adopted the Rosso corsa, or racing red, the same color of the car used to win the Peking to Paris motor challenge.
Not so luxurious but still globally recognized is the red and white from Coca-Cola, which comes from Peru's flag, "which is where the company sourced the coca leaves and cocaine its drinks contained until the 1920s".
During history, certain colors have implied power and mystical forces. It was believed the properties of Obsidian allowed one to communicate with spirits and was later connected with witchcraft. Also described is Tyrian purple, the color of the toga Julius Caesar gave his son with Cleopatra, a color only he could wear as emperor. Mentioned in the Iliad and the Aeneid, it was made from two varieties of shellfish from the Mediterranean and was meant to represent the emperor's power.
"Farther east, Bizantine queens gave birth in wine-dark rooms so that the royal offspring were said to be born "in the purple", thus cementing their right to rule".
With its distinctive light, Ultramarine was a beloved and expensive pigment used by Renaissance artists. It required a part of the budget of their contracts to be reserved for a Venetian pigment expedition (the first in the European supply chain). As legendary as atractive, Dragon's blood was associated for many years with the story of elephants and dragons clashing and dying together while their two bloods mixed.
Another color that is embedded in our lives is cochineal, a color derived from the bug juice of the cocci found in Mexico and South America. The cocci beetles are still harvested today to produce the color used by the cosmetic and food industries (M&Ms, sausages, Cherry Coke to name a few examples).
The voyage provided by Kassia St. Clair through these pages compels us to acknowledge her talent as a cultural historian, with not only a broad and colorful portfolio, but who also fell in love with colors while concentrating on something else as she describes. Her hobby of "taking a different shade and pulling it apart at the seams to discover its hidden mysteries" has led her to the construction of a book as interesting as informative.
A must for all art lovers and designers out there or just people like me who enjoy savoring our beautiful world palette.
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