Alkanna tinctoria, the dyer's alkanet or simply alkanet, is a herb in the borage family. Its main notability is its roots are used as a red dye. The plant is also known as dyers' bugloss, orchanet, Spanish bugloss, or Languedoc bugloss. It is native to the Mediterranean region. A. tinctoria has 30 chromosomes and is regarded as a dysploid at the tetraploid level.
Violet is the color of light at the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, between blue and invisible ultraviolet. It is one of the seven colors that Isaac Newton labeled when dividing the spectrum of visible light in 1672. Violet light has a wavelength between approximately 380 and 435 nanometers. The color's name is derived from the violet flower.
Purple is any of a variety of colors with hue between red and blue. In the RGB color model used in computer and television screens, purples are produced by mixing red and blue light. In the RYB color model historically used by painters, purples are created with a combination of red and blue pigments. In the CMYK color model used in printing, purples are made by combining magenta pigment with either cyan pigment, black pigment, or both.
Indigo dye is an organic compound with a distinctive blue color. Historically, indigo was a natural dye extracted from the leaves of some plants of the Indigofera genus, in particular Indigofera tinctoria; dye-bearing Indigofera plants were commonly grown and used throughout the world, in Asia in particular, as an important crop, with the production of indigo dyestuff economically important due to the previous rarity of some blue dyestuffs historically.
Tyrian purple, also known as Phoenician red, Phoenician purple, royal purple, imperial purple, or imperial dye, is a reddish-purple natural dye. The name Tyrian refers to Tyre, Lebanon. It is secreted by several species of predatory sea snails in the family Muricidae, rock snails originally known by the name 'Murex'. In ancient times, extracting this dye involved tens of thousands of snails and substantial labor, and as a result, the dye was highly valued. The colored compound is 6,6′-dibromoindigo.
Isatis tinctoria, also called woad, dyer's woad, or glastum, is a flowering plant in the family Brassicaceae with a documented history of use as a blue dye and medicinal plant. Its genus name, Isatis, derives from the ancient Greek word for the plant, ἰσάτις. It is occasionally known as Asp of Jerusalem. Woad is also the name of a blue dye produced from the leaves of the plant. Woad is native to the steppe and desert zones of the Caucasus, Central Asia to Eastern Siberia and Western Asia but is now also found in South-Eastern and Central Europe and western North America.
Mauveine, also known as aniline purple and Perkin's mauve, was one of the first synthetic dyes. It was discovered serendipitously by William Henry Perkin in 1856 while he was attempting to synthesise the phytochemical quinine for the treatment of malaria. It is also among the first chemical dyes to have been mass-produced.
Hydrangea macrophylla is a species of flowering plant in the family Hydrangeaceae, native to Japan. It is a deciduous shrub growing to 2 m (7 ft) tall by 2.5 m (8 ft) broad with large heads of pink or blue flowers in summer and autumn. Common names include bigleaf hydrangea, French hydrangea, lacecap hydrangea, mophead hydrangea, penny mac and hortensia. It is widely cultivated in many parts of the world in many climates. It is not to be confused with H. aspera 'Macrophylla'.
Chrozophora is a plant genus of the family Euphorbiaceae first described as a genus in 1824. It comprises monoecious herbs or undershrubs. The genus is widespread across Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Indigofera tinctoria, also called true indigo, is a species of plant from the bean family that was one of the original sources of indigo dye.
Orcein, also archil, orchil, lacmus and C.I. Natural Red 28, are names for dyes extracted from several species of lichen, commonly known as "orchella weeds", found in various parts of the world. A major source is the archil lichen, Roccella tinctoria. Orcinol is extracted from such lichens. It is then converted to orcein by ammonia and air. In traditional dye-making methods, urine was used as the ammonia source. If the conversion is carried out in the presence of potassium carbonate, calcium hydroxide, and calcium sulfate, the result is litmus, a more complex molecule. The manufacture was described by Cocq in 1812 and in the UK in 1874. Edmund Roberts noted orchilla as a principal export of the Cape Verde islands, superior to the same kind of "moss" found in Italy or the Canary Islands, that in 1832 was yielding an annual revenue of $200,000. Commercial archil is either a powder or a paste. It is red in acidic pH and blue in alkaline pH.
Litmus is a water-soluble mixture of different dyes extracted from lichens. It is often absorbed onto filter paper to produce one of the oldest forms of pH indicator, used to test materials for acidity.
Kermes is a red dye derived from the dried bodies of the females of a scale insect in the genus Kermes, primarily Kermes vermilio. The Kermes insects are native in the Mediterranean region and are parasites living on the sap of the host plant, the Kermes oak and the Palestine oak. These insects were used as a red dye since antiquity by the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Indians, Greeks, Romans, and Iranians. The kermes dye is a rich red, a crimson. It has good colour fastness in silk and wool. It was much esteemed in the medieval era for dyeing silk and wool, particularly scarlet cloth. Post-medievally it was replaced by other red dyes, starting with cochineal.
Turnsole or folium was a dyestuff prepared from the annual plant Chrozophora tinctoria.
Anthocyanins, also called anthocyans, are water-soluble vacuolar pigments that, depending on their pH, may appear red, purple, blue, or black. In 1835, the German pharmacist Ludwig Clamor Marquart gave the name Anthokyan to a chemical compound that gives flowers a blue color for the first time in his treatise "Die Farben der Blüthen". Food plants rich in anthocyanins include the blueberry, raspberry, black rice, and black soybean, among many others that are red, blue, purple, or black. Some of the colors of autumn leaves are derived from anthocyanins.
Wrightia tinctoria, Pala indigo plant or dyer's oleander, is a flowering plant species in the genus Wrightia found in India, southeast Asia and Australia. It is found in dry and moist regions in its distribution. Various parts of the plant have been used in traditional medicine, but there is no scientific evidence it is effective or safe for treating any disease.
Alkannin is a natural dye that is obtained from the extracts of plants from the borage family Alkanna tinctoria that are found in the south of France. The dye is used as a food colouring and in cosmetics. It is used as a red-brown food additive in regions such as Australia. Alkannin is deep red in an acid and blue in an alkaline environment. The chemical structure as a naphthoquinone derivative was first determined by Brockmann in 1936. The R-enantiomer of alkannin is known as shikonin, and the racemic mixture of the two is known as shikalkin.
Natural dyes are dyes or colorants derived from plants, invertebrates, or minerals. The majority of natural dyes are vegetable dyes from plant sources—roots, berries, bark, leaves, and wood—and other biological sources such as fungi.
Dyeing is the craft of imparting colors to textiles in loose fiber, yarn, cloth or garment form by treatment with a dye. Archaeologists have found evidence of textile dyeing with natural dyes dating back to the Neolithic period. In China, dyeing with plants, barks and insects has been traced back more than 5,000 years. Natural insect dyes such as Tyrian purple and kermes and plant-based dyes such as woad, indigo and madder were important elements of the economies of Asia and Europe until the discovery of man-made synthetic dyes in the mid-19th century. Synthetic dyes quickly superseded natural dyes for the large-scale commercial textile production enabled by the industrial revolution, but natural dyes remained in use by traditional cultures around the world.
Chrozophoridin is a chemical used as a dye.
