99% Invisible - 340- The Secret Lives of Color

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

Here at 99% Invisible, we think about color a lot, so it was really exciting when we came across a beautiful book called The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair It’s this amazing collection of stories about different colors, the way they’ve been made through history, and the lengths to which people will go to get the brightest splash of color. The Secret Lives of Color

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. My boy Maslow's favorite color is red. My boy Carver's favorite color is blue. Carver is okay with the color red, but Maslow hates blue. They're twins, and for those who don't know them well, the color they wear is how people tell them apart. These colors were not chosen for them, it just happened. It is fundamental to who they are. When you're a kid, your favorite color is one of maybe five of the most important aspects of your personality. Over the course of our lives, the fervor for a specific favorite color tends to die down. But over the course of human history, the search for the brightest splash of color

has been a defining feature of our species. Cassius and Claire is fascinated by color, how it's made, what it means, and how it defines us. She wrote a beautiful book called The Secret Lives of Color that I love so much that I invited her in to talk with me and she's riveting. So this episode is just that. My conversation with Cassia Sinclair, all about the secret lives of color. So Cassia, how did you begin becoming obsessed with colors and what made you want to write a whole book about the lives of color? Yes, I'm lucky that I came from quite a creative family.

My mother was a florist and I have very vivid memories of kind of messing around in her flower shop when I was little and I would be given kind of like the offcuts to make little bouquets from. So that was, I think, the beginning of my love of colour. But I became interested in it academically at university because I was studying 18th century women's history and more specifically what women wore to mask-grade balls during the 18th century. And one of the things that I loved about studying this very

niche topic is the fact that I got to read so many journals and letters about what people were planning to wear or had worn at parties and you know it was sort of filled with gossip and something that really struck me time and again was the fact that friends were using colour terms in these letters and diaries and accounts that were completely unfamiliar to me and that I would have to go and do an awful lot of research to try and recreate what that color might look like. And sometimes it was just impossible for me. I simply wouldn't ever be able to find out exactly

what that color looked like. And the fact that the color vocabulary had just shifted, I was in London, I was in the same city where these people were writing about. And it really wasn't that long ago historically. And yet, the colour terminology had changed really almost completely. The colours that were faster and more than were not colours that I even recognised. And that just blew my mind and sort of continued to be of interest to me, and I would always be fascinated by it.

And I mean, in your book, you talk a lot about the relationship between language and color and one of the most interesting things to me was how different languages divide up the color spectrum differently. Yes absolutely so if you think about a color wheel or you know if you think about a way of representing all the colors we could possibly see it wouldn't be in you know a straight a'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r decide this is red and this is blue and this is purple. That can really change. And it can change on an individual basis and also on a linguistic basis.

So various languages have divided up the spectrum differently into more or fewer groups, but also in different ways. So for example, Russian speakers have a word for darker blue and a word for lighter blue, for example, and some languages only divide the color spectrum into kind of three or four groups. Right. I always struck by this in your book that in the section on pink, that there's a word

for pink, and there's no word for light yellow or light green. It's just, it's so strange that it has its own nomenclature. Yeah, it's a real sort of cultural oddity and particularly, you know, pink now plays such an outsized role in our culture both because it's associated with women and girls, but you know, for good and ill. But also we just we just seem to really love it in Western culture. It comes up a lot and and you're right, far more than you would think of, say, a pale green or a pale blue. Yeah. I mean, there's a sense that these colors exist, kind of as concepts, but your book, The Secret Lives of Color, is really about color in the material world, about the pigments themselves. And so I kind of want to go through a few of those pigments to sort of tease out

these types of stories that we get. And I was thinking that we could just start with red because it seems to be the most universally loved color through history. Why is that? Yeah, it's a really interesting one. So one of the questions that I get asked without fail every time I do a talk about color is whether colors make humans have a real physical response. And quite often this idea is slightly junk science, like pink makes you calm or whatever.

And it's very hard to really pin down valid scientific data on this. But red is the colour where the most tests have been done and the most tests have come back with fairly compelling results a'r gweith are wearing red have won on average more than they should have done statistically. Wow. And there was another similar study done on the Olympics as well, you know, the Athens Olympic Games on combat sports and it, and again, you had similar results, which it does just seem incredible, but also makes you think that if you're ever to play a sport,

you should definitely make sure that you're the team where I'm red. And red is also one of the oldest colors. Can you talk about how people made red in the ancient world? Sure. So, one of the oldest pigments, all this red pigments that we know about is hematite, which essentially you can kind of think of like rust. It's iron oxide, you find it in okas, reddishokas, and the sort of chemical compounds from which it's made

are really common in the earth's crust. You get kind of red-earth, red-tinted earths, geographically in really widespread areas. So it's not surprising in a way that it's cropped up in a lot of different archaeological contexts all over the world in China and as America, North Africa, Europe, it's cropped up again and again and again. It's so universal that it was sort of dubbed by a 1980s

anthropologist as one of the sort of the two consistent markers of kind of human evolution, along with toolmaking, that was the other one. So wearing hematite red and toolmaking are the things that make humans human. Yes. That's amazing. But hematite sort of falls out of fashion

because we find brighter versions of red. So one of the reasons why I love color as a subject, you know, I'm just so fascinated by it, is because humans have always gone to the most extreme and extraordinary lengths to get their hands on brighter and more interesting shades. And that's really evident when you talk about red. So, you know, yes, they have this really widely available red earth that they can sort of dig up from almost anywhere in the world, but that is not enough, it's not bright enough. And so somewhere along the line, someone discovers that if you crush up

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That's amazing. There's another red. Can you help me pronounce this? This is like Coach Chenille. How do you say? Yeah, Coach Chenille. Coach Chenille red. Can you help me pronounce this? Is it like coachanille? How do you say it? Yeah, coachanille. Coachanille. Yeah, so it's actually, yeah, and it's

very similar actually to Scarlett, because it's also made with a scale insect. But this one, rather than being European, is very common in South and Central America. And was used very widely by Aztecs and Incas in their culture and again it was associated with rulers and power but it was also a part of their taxation system in a way. So when there were sort of vassal states, the vassal states would be expected to give their rulers certain numbers of sacks of cosonial dye or the dried bugs, sort of every month or two months, depending on how wealthy

this vassal state was. So it was really sort of highly valued and really embedded in the culture. How did this colour interact with colonization and trade around the world? So colors and colorants, you know, have been one of those things that people go and take over other countries and exploit other areas of the world for it. You know, they're very often natural resources that people are desperate to get their hands on and that they can make an awful lot of money from back home. And so, you know, Coshineal was one of the products that the Spanish were desperate to get their hands on

in order to get this red colorant back to Europe where it was actually many times stronger than the kermis dye that had been originally used to color scarlet cloth. Coshineal is much stronger. And so it's much more cost effective and great sums of money could be made and were made in the export and use of this dye.

And it took like 70,000 bucks to get a pound of cochineal, right? Yeah, I mean, with all these dyes that are made out of animals or animal products, you know, that it's really the poor creature that's involved in the making of the color really does get completely hammered, you know, very often it takes an awful lot of them to produce not very much dye or not very much colourant and often you find, you know, them being driven to the brink of extinction just because people are so keen to get their hands on the color. And do we still use insects like these to make pigments today? in Quebec extinction just because people are so keen to get their hands on the colour.

And do we still use insects like these to make pigments today? Yes, so there is a slightly grim side to this particular colour in that it's a natural red colour and also because it's really highly pigmented, It's been used in kind of food and also cosmetics. So if you were to look at your strawberry yogurt or something like that, you might see that it's been colored with comic acid or you might see it down as the colorant E120. And that is in fact, cochineal bugs.

Whoa, okay. So if you see E120 that you're eating bugs. Yes, but if you think about it, all the colorants that are used in food, I mean, you know, maybe we're all different, but you know, if you replace E120 with another colorant, that the likelihood is that that colorant might well be an extract from like a coltar sludge, which is where a lot of other colorants come from. So, you know, I don't know, coltar or or... You could eat cold, you could eat bugs. Yeah, exactly. So, as you mentioned, the color for a pigment, it can be pretty rare in nature and it tends

to require the wholesale slaughter of an entire species to make it happen, which sort of brings me to Tyrion Purple. Can you talk about Tyrion Purple? Yeah, so this is one of my favorite stories from this book, because many people have this automatic association between royalty and purple, and it's one of those kind of cultural links that maybe you don't think about too much, but actually the link goes really far back and it is based on this amazing purple die

called Turion Purple. Again, it's an animal-based colourant and it comes from two varieties of shellfish that are native to the Mediterranean. And if you were to go and find one of these shellfish, they're quite spiny, so you'd have to be careful when you picked it up. And if you were to crack it open, you would see that there's kind of a pale gland that runs across the back of the shellfish. And this gland contains a single drop of liquid that smells a little bit like garlic. Apparently it's really unpleasant smelling like garlic breath and this liquid is phenomenal when it's exposed to the light, if you were to sort of rub it on a piece of cloth and expose that piece of cloth to the light, it would immediately change colour.

It would turn yellow and then green and then blue and then finally purple. The colour that it produces is very distinctive and very vibrant and this was the dye beloved by the ancient world and became again because it was very expensive, really associated with power and royalty. So again, you get lots of legislation dictating who can and can't wear it. There's a kind of a famous story about the emperor Nero who turned up to a recital and saw a woman in the audience wearing a terrain purple gown and she wasn't, you know, of the right class or status to wear it. And so he had her taken from the room and whipped and had all her lands confiscated because he saw

this as a real way of usurping his own power because she was taking the power bestowed by this color. It was so potent a symbol symbol which is kind of amazing. Yeah. But again like the poor scale bugs the the four shellfish you know went through went through horrors because of humans desire for this purple so you know it takes about 250,000 of these shellfish to produce just an ounce of dye and so people were hunting these shellfish a'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r fforddd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd or ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd die in the classical era. The discarded shells have almost become kind of hills outside the town, very often downwind of the town, all the diworks which were generally associated downwind, so that the citizens who ended up wearing the terryon purple gowns wouldn't be bothered by the smell of the manufacture. Wow. And so when did purple kind of lose its association? I mean, it's always been

associated with royalty, but when did it become acceptable for a common folk to wear it without getting whipped? Well, to re-imperial, both because the shellfish, you know, became incredibly rare, but also because of political turmoil around the Mediterranean, which kind of really disrupted the manufacture of the dye. To re-imperial itself, largely disappeared from view. Purple kind of goes into a little bit of a decline until the mid-19th century, when an entirely new purple dye was discovered completely by accident and this sort of led to a revival. And what's that what's that I call? So the the new purple dye that

was discovered in the mid 19th century is called MOVE and it was discovered by an 18-year-old scientist who was at home on holiday and using his vacation time to try and find a synthetic version of Quinnine, which was a cure for malaria. The time, malaria, agues, were really common in Europe. And it was thought that being able to produce a synthetic Quinnine would be a huge money maker for anyone who could discover it.

So that's what he was doing. He was spending his days working on this in his father's attic. And on one of his failed experiments, what he ended up with in his test tube was a sort of purple sludge. And I think, you know, he definitely knew this wasn't quinine, but I think possibly because he was interested in art and had painted in his younger days. He decided that rather than just throwing this purple sludge away, he would add a bit of really colourfast and very vibrant purple die. And this was incredible. In fact, it led to a whole revolution in synthetic dies. It was the first synthetic die that could be manufactured, not using any natural components, so no bugs, no vessels, no porcelain fish, and it just allowed purple to be worn by a much greater section of society than ever before. And so the invention of MOVE really just impacted the entire textile industry because of this

possibility, so it opened up an artificial dye, and is that the right way to put it? Yes, although you'd think it would be kind of immediate, you'd think that the whole world would very quickly cotton on, if you'd excuse the pun, to the value of this synthetic dye. But in fact, it took a while for this scientist who was called William Perkin to persuade textile dyers that this was the way forward, because they were used to working with natural plant a'r i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyrwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllwyr i'n pwyllw He persuaded a couple of textile mills to use this dye,

and one of them ended up selling a gown to some members of royalty. So Princess Eugenie wore a gown in this purple, and then the real clincher was Queen Victoria, wore a mauve gown to one of her daughter's weddings, and this got sort of greatly reported in the press that was this new color, and it became a complete fashion trend,

so much so that a year after Queen Victoria had worn this gown, a sort of satirical, English newspaper reported that London had become afflicted with the move measles because so many people were wearing this color. Ha, ha, ha, ha. I think I was intrigued, especially by the color green afflicted with the move measles because so many people were wearing this color. I think I was intrigued especially by the color green in your book because it seems like it is this thing that's so fundamental to nature, it's everywhere, but it was historically really challenging to make. Could you explain why that is? Yeah, so although, like you say, we kind of look around the world and it seems like there's

a lot of green in our world. In fact, it's very difficult to make stable, vibrant green colourants, either as pigments in paint, but also in dyes as well. And there were some who were sort of adept at it, and very often artists who were able to make vibrant greens would make them by layering various different colours on top of each other. And dyes would have to sort of again work with several different dye colours, which was, you know, in the medieval world,

the mixing of dyes was really frowned on. Who, why is that? It's often because of guild restrictions, because they were very protective of their guild skills. And so a dyes guild that dealt with woeed or indigo, blue dyes, were very reluctant to also work with yellow colorants. And so the mixing of blue and yellow to create a green was almost seen as as devilish and really transgressive in many ways. That's amazing.

Because it's like something that any kid with paint knows how to do almost instinctively. Yeah, it is an odd one. It's one of those things where you suddenly realize how far away you are from the people you're studying when you're reading these documents and you're looking at these debates surrounding it and prosecutions. The prosecution of people making green cloth. Right. So artists were able to find good reds and good yellows, but greens were kind of hard to find. How did they end up finding the right green for painting? kind of hard to find. How did they end up finding the right green for painting?

Yeah, so greens were elusive. Some artists were able to create vibrant greens by using kind of intermediary layers, and it was a real kind of trade skill. It was a closely guarded secret by some artists, you know, the secret to their green, their ability to create these beautiful colors. secret to their degree and their ability to create these, you know, beautiful colors. But there aren't really very many stable, natural, green pigments that artists have access to, which meant that when they started being created in this kind of, you know, rush of new chemicals and experimentation in the 19th century, the creation of new greens, they were taken up really rapidly and without much thought or care for what she was contained in these greens. In particular, a green called Sheila's Green, could you tell us about the uptake of that and the horrible effects of that?

Yeah, so this was created by a Swedish scientist in 1775. And because there was this dearth of bright green pigments on the market, and this was relatively cheap, it got taken up by artists and wallpaper manufacturers and dress makers incredibly quickly. Well within a decade it was kind of everywhere. One of my favorite stories is that the writer Charles Dickens came back from a trip to Naples where he'd seen a lot of this green being used and decided that he was going to decorate his entire house, this one particular shade of green, from the basement to the attic.

And very luckily for him and for us, who have read and enjoyed his work, his wife just dissuaded him and said that she thought it was disgusting color. And he ended up not decorating his entire house, this particular sort of grassy emerald green. And I say luckily for us because it was discovered that this pigment that was made from arsenic was really poisonous or could be really poisonous. It was found that in samples of wallpaper that were, you know, only a few inches across,

contained enough arsenic to kill two adults. One of the industries that this green was really popular in was the artificial flower industry, because obviously it was used to paint the stems and the leaves of these artificial flowers. And a girl called Matilda, who was quite young, I think she was only 18 or 19, started working in an artificial flower factory and very quickly became very ill. And a doctor in London started looking into the causes of this because you know, she had a really disparate array of symptoms and eventually discovered that it was this green colourant but by that time it was far too late it was all over the country, all over the world, it was used in wallpaper and dress fabric, you know, you name it, it

was painted this, you know, arsenic, laden, green. But one of the most famous supposed victims of this green is actually Napoleon. It was found out after his death that there was quite a lot of green in the wallpaper that was used to decorate his rooms. And it was thought for a long time that this arsenic green might have contributed to his death. Although subsequent tests have actually shown,

they managed to find samples of samples of his hair throughout his life. Goodness only knows how, but they tested all these samples of hair and found that actually he had really high arsenic levels throughout his life and that it didn't rise suspiciously just before his death. Although I'm sure being in a room covered with arsenic wallpaper, can't have helped his health one little bit. One of the strange things I think you learn reading your book is the place of blue in history. How popular was blue as a color throughout history? So now it's one of the most popular, if not the most popular, color globally among men and women.

And it's kind of seen as being, you know, inspiring trust and confidence and all good things. And you kind of, you're tempted to kind of push that back into history. But in fact, if you look at the ancient world and kind of really up until the 14th century, Blue was seen as unlucky, uncouth, unfashionable, associated with kind of barbarism, particularly in the West, this is, in Western thought and Western culture. And it was only with the kind of the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary in Christianity because she was popularly depicted wearing blue garments that blue began to have this cultural resurgence in Western thought and suddenly became pretty quickly a really popular color.

That's amazing. So who decided to depict her wearing blue? I mean, who made that decision to change the world? Yeah, so it's kind of incredible. So I'm around about the same time that the cult of the Virgin Mary was growing. The use of this particular pigment, um, ultramarine, which was made from lapis lazilai, was growing and being kind of perfected. Pislazili was growing and being kind of perfected. And again, because it was this really vivid color and was incredibly expensive, it became a way of artists and patrons

of showing their devotion to the Virgin Mary by depicting her in this really expensive luminous pigment that came from a very long way away. You know, even its name, ultra marine comes from ultra and marae beyond the sea. The pigment itself kind of has this amazingly exotic connotations and that became bound up with the cult of the Virgin Mary and the two kind of bounced off each other and brought each other up in a funny sort of way. Could you describe how Ultramarine was made?

Sure. So many people are familiar with Lapis Lazuli, which is the semi-pressure stone is the kind of the raw material for making Ultramarine. It's kind of a really gorgeous dark blue stone that's used a lot in jewelry and kind of looks a little bit like the night sky It's this really deep blue and it often has kind of trace series of white that look a little bit like clouds

and also Can often contain little pieces of fool's gold that look a little bit like stars. It's really beautiful But in order to get from this very gorgeous Semi-precious stone to a pigment takes an awful lot of hard work. The minds, the Afghanistan minds where the LAPIS and Lazy I came from were incredibly remote. The stone would have to be loaded onto donkeys and camels, taken across the silk route to the coast of the Mediterranean, put on ships, and they would usually fetch up in Venice, which is sort of the the ports where so many luxury goods came into Europe.

And once an artist had bought his piece of Lapis Lazuli, the work was still far from over. The stone had to be ground down to a powder and then it had to be purified. Those bits of fool's gold and the white traceries that I mentioned in the original stone had those elements had to be removed because they turned the blue colorant rather dull and a bit ashy. And the way that was done is the blue, the powdered blue stone would be mixed with a mastic wax and then it would be needed, almost like you're sort of needing a dough to make bread in a solution of of lye. And as the dough was was needed and the flakes of blue would fall out to the bottom of the lye solution and you'd then be able to tip a'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r

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gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio' pigments that was used during this time and very often when you see a painting of the Virgin Mary she'll be swathed in a rich blue cloth and usually that cloth will be painted using ultramarine. And it's also kind of at the root of one of my favourite kind of colour facts, which is that you know, although now we think of pink as being for girls and blue as being for boys. In fact, if you were to go back sort of a, you know, just a little over a century, a century and a half,

it was the other way around pink and was sort of seen as pale red and was much more associated with boys and blue because of association with the Virgin Mary was seen as the more feminine and dainty color. Mm-hmm, well. The process of extracting and purifying these colors seems so arduous and speaks to the desire for the end product

that they would go through such efforts to try to create it. You've identified this like real human pursuit of like, basically, you know, food, shelter, and the brightest color imaginable. It seemed to be just part of ingrained in our DNA. Yeah, we love shiny bright colors and we are prepared to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to have them. So I want to talk about orange because I need to know once and for all what came first,

the colour or the fruit. The fruit came first. Yeah, well there you go. Yeah, the fruit came first and as it travelled across the world, it brought its name and its colour with it, which is rather nice, but, in the English language, orange was called orange. It was actually called yellow red, which kind of makes sense, but isn't... Yeah.

It's a bit long-winded. So let's talk broadly about the colour black. I think people think of black as one thing, but there are lots of different shades of black. So could you describe what black is and what black means in the world? Yes, it's a funny thing that if you go into a paint shop or clothing store, you can find so many hundreds, thousands of variants of white and we can call them cream or ivory or pearl and we've got lots of different names for them. And yet we just sort of collapse

so many subtle blacks into one very big overarching label. And in fact black has many different subtleties of tone, you know, as white does. And yet we just don't, you know, our vocabulary for black is really poor. And that, you know, was one of the colours that I was most worried about when I was writing the book. I was like, oh, you know, am I going to get to this one chapter and just have nothing to say. And I found completely the opposite. I found I became frustrated. I wanted people of the past to have been as excited about black as they were about reds and blues because it seemed to me that there was such richness there that it seemed a shame that we, you know, I didn't have the vocabulary to do it justice.

Well, so when you talked earlier about the arrival of MOVE or the arrival of green into the world and how the world just kind of exploded with excitement and how amazing it is to think of discovering or seeing a color for the first time, the closest analog I can come to is when I saw Vanta Black for the first time, which almost breaks your brain without Black it is. Can you describe what Vanta Black is and how you encountered it? Yeah, so I guess you should probably start with the name Vanta Black. It sounds sort of very space age, but actually it's kind of, it comes from a useful acronym, the Vanta stands for vertically aligned nano tube array. And essentially,

Vanta Black is, it's not really a colour, it's more of a substance that absorbs more light than anything else on Earth. And that is because of its structure, because of these vertically aligned tubes, tiny, tiny, tiny filaments of carbon fiber. The light gets kind of absorbed between and amongst these fibers and can't get out, it gets trapped. And so very little light is reflected. What did they make this substance? Well, it was created for kind of a really specific purpose. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r

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And it's far too dark, it's far too light absorbing for it to give our eyes any information about the kind of environment we're in. So what I mean by that is when I first saw a sample of anter black, it was kind of grown onto a sample of, onto a piece of crumpled up aluminum foil. And when you looked at the reverse, you could see all the different planes, you could see that it was a scrumpled piece of aluminum foil from the different planes of light. And that gave you

information about where you were in relation to the tin foil and the fact that it was scrumpled and all the rest of it. When it was turned over to expose the van to black coated side, suddenly what you saw was what looked like a kind of a mistake, like an acumen black hole, because your eyes weren't being given enough information. So what you saw was, even though you knew that this piece of aluminum foil was 3D, you

know, had lots of contours, you couldn't discern that all of a sudden, all of a sudden all you could see was just a black hole and that was incredibly uncanny, both for me, sort of, yeah, completely mad, seeing it in a sample, in a lab, even though I knew exactly what I was going there to see, I went there expecting it and yet still I couldn't quite wrap my head around it, but it really shocked people and I spoke to the scientist who was involved in its creation. And he said he was getting calls from people soon after it had been discovered, telling him that this creation must in some way be associated with

the devil because, you know, anything that black that gave back that little information to our eyes must be, you know, intrinsically evil, which is such an odd, you know, an odd knee-jerk reaction. But in fact, you know, it's incredible. Yeah, but it's also, it totally harkens back to all these stories that you've told us, that these associations, these primal associations, we have with these colors, it sounds exactly like, you know, the alchemists told that they can't mix blue and yellow, or they're going to work at the devil. Yeah, maybe we haven't moved on all that far after all.

Maybe not. I actually had a question about the design of the book itself. Yeah, maybe we haven't moved on all that far after all. Maybe not. I actually had a question about the design of the book itself. It's really beautiful. And one of the coolest parts is that you have a colored stripe on the edge of the pages that go with each color story. But I couldn't help but think about how stressful it must have been. You know, you have to be right on the money that you got the right pigment

in the printing process and everything, that there's something that kept you up at night. Yes, it did. I'm not gonna tell you which color it is that gives me, that still gives me sleepless nights. But I have it, I had anxiety nightmares about people coming at me and saying, you're your sky blue is wrong

or whatever it is, I just thought, oh no, I thought I'm going to get myself into so much trouble. And what was so stupid is that part of the argument of the book is that there is no true ultramarine. Colors are cultural creations and they're kind of shifting all the time, sort of like tectonic plates. Color is not a precise thing. It's changing, it's living, it's constantly being redefined and argued over. And that's part of the magic of it. That's part of why I love it, but it's also part of why

it is infuriating. And particularly when you find yourself in the position of having to choose the right color for each and every page of your book, you end up finding the whole thing completely ridiculous and cursing the fact that you were interested in colour in the first place. A final story from Katia Zinclair about the colour blue in art forgery, and Nazis. When we come back.

With one of the most amazing stories of art forgery, here again is Cautier Saint Claire. Just after the Second World War, a lot of people in Europe were being prosecuted for collaboration and those who'd collaborated with the Nazis during the war were being investigated. And one of those was an art dealer called Van Migren, who had sold an awful lot of canvases of Vermeer's and various other artists, to Nazi collectors and even to kind of hit his own art collection itself.

The prosecution sort of began of this art dealer. And he turned around and said, actually, you shouldn't be prosecuting me. You should think of me as a hero because far from selling out amazing Dutch-owned art to the Nazis, what I was actually doing is I was creating these masterpieces from scratch, I'm a forger, I was never selling for me as to the Nazis,

I was just ripping them off. And he had made a fortune during this period. He'd made, I think, the modern figure is somewhere in the region of around $33 million that he'd made by selling these supposed artworks. So he found himself in this really odd position of having to prove that he was guilty of forgery in order to prove that he was innocent of collaboration. And the pigment that eventually kind of proved that he had forged these pictures, which by this time were in all those, that had most well respected art galleries all over Europe,

he'd fooled an awful lot of people as well as the Nazis. But the pigment that this all turned on was cobalt blue because it had been discovered a long time after Vermeer's death and yet was discovered to have been used in this one particular Vermeer, fake Vermeer that he had created. And so he managed to prove that he was guilty of forgery because of the presence of Cobalt Blue, where in fact he had meant to use ultramarine, which was, you know, the pigment that Vermeer would have used. That's so good. Well, this is so much fun. Thank you so much. I enjoy this immensely. Oh, it was my pleasure. It was really great fun. 99% invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, music by Sean Rial.

Katie Mingle is the senior producer Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Avery Trouffleman, Terran Mazza, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, Sharif Yusif, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective

of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But you can probably surmise the show's favorite color at 99PI.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.