Synthetic dyes and Perkin's mauve: explained simply

For most of history, dyes came from plants, insects and shellfish. That changed in 1856 when William Henry Perkin, an eighteen-year-old chemistry student in London, accidentally made a purple dye from coal tar. He called it mauve. Within fifty years factory-made dyes had replaced nearly all natural ones, with heavy consequences for the farmers who had grown them.

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The accident

Perkin was trying to make quinine, the malaria medicine, in a home laboratory during the Easter holiday. His experiment with aniline, a chemical obtained from coal tar, left a black sludge. When he cleaned the flask with alcohol, the sludge dissolved into a strong purple that dyed silk and did not wash out. Coal tar was a waste product of the gasworks that lit Victorian cities. Perkin patented the dye, left college and opened a factory near London with his father and brother. Mauve became highly fashionable within a few years.

An industry follows

Chemists across Europe began searching coal tar for more colours. Magenta, methyl violet and a range of blues and greens followed in the 1860s. In 1868 two German chemists worked out how to make alizarin, the red in madder root, and the madder fields of Europe went out of use within a decade. German firms such as BASF, Bayer and Hoechst came to dominate. The same companies and the same chemistry later produced early medicines, photographic chemicals and plastics. The modern chemical and pharmaceutical industries began as dye makers.

Indigo and India

The German chemist Adolf von Baeyer first made indigo in the laboratory in 1880, and he later won a Nobel Prize for his work on dyes. A process cheap enough to sell took until 1897. At that time Bengal and Bihar grew most of the world's indigo under a system that forced tenant farmers to plant it on poor terms. Exports collapsed within about fifteen years. The grievances of indigo growers in Champaran, Bihar, led to Mahatma Gandhi's first major campaign in India in 1917. Almost all indigo used in blue jeans today is synthetic.

Colours on this page

MauveineA purple dye first made by accident in 1856, launching the synthetic dye industry MagentaA purplish-pink colour named after a battle and key to modern printing AlizarinA deep red dye first made from madder roots, later produced from coal tar IndigoA deep blue dye from plants, now mostly made synthetically and known for colouring denim

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.