Plant dyes: indigo, madder, turmeric and henna: explained simply

Until the 1850s nearly all cloth was dyed with plants. A handful mattered most. Indigo gave blue, madder gave red, and a long list of plants gave yellow, of which turmeric is the best known in South Asia. Henna stained skin and hair. India grew or traded all four, and the English word indigo comes from the Greek for Indian.

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Skeins dyed naturally with madder root, hanging to dry, at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA. 3/31/12 — Photo: Madison60, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Indigo

Indigo comes from the leaves of Indigofera plants, which contain no blue at all. The leaves are soaked and fermented to release a colourless substance, and the liquid is then beaten so that air turns it into blue indigo, which settles as sludge and is dried into cakes. To dye, the indigo is dissolved again in a vat with the oxygen removed. Cloth comes out yellowish green and turns blue in the air. Other plants yield the same dye: woad in Europe, and dyer's knotweed in Japan. Kano in northern Nigeria has dye pits centuries old.

Madder and the reds

Madder is a scrambling plant whose roots contain alizarin, a red dye. With the right treatment it gives pinks, reds, purples and browns on cotton. Indian dyers used a close relative, manjistha, and the roots of the aal tree, and their skill with mordants produced the bright washable cottons that Europe called chintz. A long, many-step process using oil and alum gave an especially strong shade known in Europe as Turkey red. Madder was grown from the Netherlands to Turkey and Central Asia, where it colours most old carpets.

Turmeric and henna

Turmeric, the ground root used in cooking, dyes cloth a bright yellow with no fixing agent. The colour fades quickly in sunlight and turns red in contact with soap or lime, so it has been used mainly for cloth meant for ceremonies, and for the robes of some monks. Henna leaves, dried and ground to a paste, stain skin, nails and hair orange to deep brown. The paste is applied as mehndi before weddings and festivals across South Asia, the Middle East and North and East Africa. The stain lasts a week or two.

Colours on this page

IndigoA deep blue dye from plants, now mostly made synthetically and known for colouring denim AlizarinA deep red dye first made from madder roots, later produced from coal tar Rose madderA traditional red pigment made from the roots of the madder plant HennaA reddish dye from the henna plant, used for body art and hair since ancient times WoadA blue dye once vital to Europe's textile trade, made from the leaves of a flowering plant

Sources and further reading

About this page

Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.