More Strange Colors, More Hints Quiz

Answer: blue

After the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, the source of the dye was lost and has remained so for almost 2,000 years. The only clues are from the Talmud which says the hillazon or chilazon, a marine creature, was the source. Needless to say, Jews and others have been interested in solving the puzzle.

The murex, a marine mollusk, is currently the most common suggestion. It is also the dye source of Tyrian purple or royal purple, an expensive dye used at the time that came from mollusks found in the Mediterranean Sea.

The two blue stripes on the Israeli flag are said to be a reference to the color and its use on prayer shawls.

Answer: pink or red

Cerise comes from the French word for cherry, but there the easy work ends. The word is a good example of a difficult one to trace. The standard earliest date in English is from the November 30, 1858 London Times, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, though it is mentioned in a crochet pattern as far back as 1845, according to Wikipedia. Complicating matters is what color it actually meant in English. Cherries are more red than pink.

The Duchess of Dorsett was listed as wearing a robe of "cerise-colour satin" in a fashion article in the Jan. 29, 1793 Waterford (Ireland) Herald, while others in the same article were described as wearing pink, implying cerise might have meant red, and moving it several decades back as an English language color. Webster's 1828 Dictionary omits it, as does John Walker's 1835 Dictionary. One could surmise that it was understandable as cherry red to English speakers who knew a little French, and became a word meaning "pink" sometime in the 19th Century.

But that includes some guesswork and shows what keeps etymologists up at night.

Answer: first synthetic fabric dye

Perkins synthesized mauve from coal tar, quite a difference from previous typical dyes that had been made from plants or animals. When Perkins saw how his discovery would dye silk a vivid purple, he immediately convinced his father to help him open a factory, as he was only eighteen, and easily convinced the fashion industry to love his new product.

His discovery started the aniline dye industry, which opened up the whole field of synthetic dyes available today.

Answer: one of the oldest pigments, used in cave paintings

Plain sienna was an artist's pigment, consisting of clay, with iron and manganese oxides. If heated, it became more reddish brown and was called burnt sienna. The name comes from Siena, with one n, a location in Italy where the clay was dug during the Renaissance, and it was first adopted into English in the 18th Century.

The clay itself could be found other places worldwide and therefore was available to cave painters. When the Italian deposits were used up, it was found elsewhere in Italy, in the US Appalachian mountains and the French Ardennes, where it was dug commercially. Today the dye can be made from synthetic iron oxide.

Answer: ultramarine

The blue pigment and paint were called "ultramarine" because they came "ultramarinus," Latin for "beyond the sea," although it would be more logical to base their name on lapis lazuli, the blue semi-precious stone that was the main ingredient. Italian traders brought lapis lazuli from mines in Afghanistan to painters in Europe, starting in the 14th Century. Before that, lapis lazuli still had been used as a decorative stone in art and ornamentation closer to where it was mined.

The eyebrows on King Tut's funeral mask are lapis lazuli, for example. Painters made careful use of the very expensive pigment, until 1826-1828, when artificial, chemically produced ultramarine was developed. Jean Baptist Guimet discovered the process first, but Christian Gmelin, a professor of chemistry in Tübingen, Germany, publicized his 1828 discovery of the same thing and started the industry of cheaper competitive synthetic paint.

Answer: red

The British Redcoats' red coats were dyed with cheap, widely available madder. Cochineal from insects and madder from a plant were the two main competing natural red dyes in the 19th Century, but madder was cheaper, so it often won out. Madder could also dye a brownish or orangish red by using different mordants, or fixers, and calico dyers took advantage of that fact to get different colors.

The desirable Turkey red of the 19th Century, named after the country where it was developed, was a long dye process using madder that produced a stable, bright red on cotton that barely faded.

It was the best red, until better, quicker synthetic dyes came along, but was expensive due to the many steps required.

Answer: the dye was named after the color of the grain flowers, that's all

Amaranth was a name given to an azo (chemical) dye, derived from coal tar or petroleum byproducts. It was/is used to dye food or cosmetics a deep red, as well as leather, paper, and other fibers and resins. It was banned in 1976 in the US by the FDA, which regulates food products, as a suspected carcinogen, but the dye is still used in foods in other countries, and in non-food products everywhere.

The azo dye was named after the dark red berries of the amaranth plant, but has no actual connection to any part of the plant.

Answer: lichen

Orchil lichens were boiled in ammonium carbonate and water, then kept in the room-temperature solution with extra ammonia for several weeks. At the end, the lichen could be dried and ground. Dr. Gordon tried to keep his laboratory and its methods secret, but needed to import lichen from Norway and Sweden at the rate of tons per year, not an operation one could perform too casually. Still, cudbear was an excellent dye, requiring no mordant on silk and wool, and Dr. Gordon received several letters of praise, signed by many businessmen, in the Scots Magazine, September 1776, about the value of cudbear.

The process was independently discovered by a French chemist about the same time also. I tried to offer the clue of likin' (lichen).

Answer: blue

Delft or delftware was pottery, including tile, named for the nearby city of Delft, Netherlands. It was traditionally made in shades of blue and white. Delft blue became such a well known color that it would be recognized, whether in a painting or dyed on cloth.

The height of delftware began in the 1600s and lasted into the 1700s, though blue and white pottery and tile were so popular, they were made for export by China and Japan, made by the English potters, and are still made. A hint was: unhappy, blue.

Answer: blood red

Shakespeare used "incarnadine" as a verb in "Macbeth" II ii, introducing it into the English language circa 1605. "Incarnadine" was used as a noun to mean blood red, circa 1620, surely derived from Shakespeare's verb. Earlier, "incarnadine" was entering the English language from French or Italian with the meaning of pink or fleshcolor, but that meaning disappeared.