In a message dated 3/20/2006 2:54:36 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
In about 1840ies i heard there was a new invention with a very bright green colour. They made wall hangings with this dyed silks and also it became a very popular colour for fashionable ball dresses. But they didnt realise that it was a very poisonable dye. The skin would consume the poison. There was a very bright green, lo-kao, introduced in the mid-19th century, but it was a natural dye, and not poisonous, that I know of. This was called vert lumiere in France, as it looked so beautiful under candlelight. Not until the introduction of synthetic dyes would such a brilliant green be available any other way. You know that the most common way to get green fabrics was to dye the fabric in an indigo vat and then overdye it with yellow (or vice versa). The nature of inidigo means that you can't just stir the blue and yellow dyes together in one pot and get green. And, despite its prevalence in nature, there is no common natural dyestuff that colors a good medium green. With the right mordant, you can get kind of an olive green color from some of the yellow dyes. The arsenical pigments, used for paints and later printing wallpaper, were, as my last post stated, reported to have been used to color garments. Pigments, unlike dyes, must be fixed to fabric in some way and so don't work very well for coloring fabrics. They can also flake off, which might indeed have poisoned the wearer. But as similar stories were published many years apart, I find them suspect. Ann Wass _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
