With no light there is no color

Color is light: An obvious truth, no doubt. And how sad it would be to live in a black-and-white world like the 1920s movies or the TV before the arrival of man on the moon. We would not feel the same enjoyment a sunset, an impressionist painting, or a fruit basket; yet the world is colorless.

The color we see is a subjective sensation of what light, whether from the sun or a lamp, does to our retina, as it is not absorbed by objects. This is enunciated in the laws of optics that speak to us about refraction and reflection, protons, and waves.  And if the scientists say so, we are not going to argue about it.  Fortunately, today we will talk about something more understandable, such as where the different pigments for dyeing, painting, and coloring our lives come from. We studied in school that there are three primary colors: blue, red, and yellow, and that from their combination arise the others. Let’s talk about the origin of some of the pigments that have been used to reproduce them.

Pigment is a substance that gives color; it is generally presented in powder form and its main characteristic, unlike colorants, is that it does not dissolve in most liquids, but remains in suspension. It was already known by primitive men who mixed Sulphur minerals, lead, vegetable coal, and ground iron oxides with animal fat or tree resin to decorate the caves where they were kept. They also used animal blood and applied this cocktail to the walls with their hands, feathers, or hair. But blue did not exist in their caves.

Blue, with more than 100 color shades, according to surveys, it is the color preferred by most people in the United States and Europe. It is associated with harmony, confidence, and authority; it conveys calm and peace, but also coldness and sadness: in English blue expresses a feeling and blues is a melancholic musical genre. In Central Asia or Turkey, it symbolizes mourning and in China, it reminds one of ghosts and death. In Japan, it is everyday life and in Egypt it is virtue; nobility for the Tuareg, nomads from North Africa, called “the blue men” because of the color of their clothing.

The super ingenious Egyptians, always relevant in the history of civilization, created around 2000 BC the first synthetic blue from limestone and any mineral that had copper that when heated produced a hard paste-like glass; reduced to dust, it was mixed with egg white to color statues and ceramics. They were unable to extract pigment from the lapis lazuli they brought back from Afghanistan and used it for their jewelry. From this semi-precious stone came the ultramarine blue brought to Europe by Italian traders and used since the end of the Middle Ages in commissioned paintings, as it was very expensive and only the rich could afford it.

In Greco-Roman times, other ways of obtaining blue were found. They extracted it from plants such as woad or pastel grass whose production process was long and rather laborious, or indigo blue (genus Indigofera) which, as its name indicates, came from India. Both plants, easily cultivated and widespread throughout the world, were used mainly for dyeing cloth. Indigo, popular in England for everyday clothing due to its low cost, was replaced at the end of the 19th century by a synthetic color used to make army uniforms and the symbol of the worker and the common man: denim trousers.

Other dazzling blues are cobalt blue, used in Chinese porcelain and by painters like Renoir and Van Gogh, taken from the oxide of that metal, and Prussian blue, the first modern laboratory-created pigment, which we see in Prussian uniforms and was used by Hokusai in his Great Wave of Kanagawa and Picasso in his blue period. A decade ago, a new shade of blue was discovered: YInMn.

Soon we will talk about the other two of the primary trio: red and yellow.