Word: colorations
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...what really matters for Finlay are the stories behind a color: the thieves who conspired to steal the secret ingredients of an exquisite shade or the purple ooze of a rare sea snail or the red cochineal beetle that feeds off cactus. She traces why red ocher is sacred among Australian Aborigines, then jumps over to Renaissance Italy to muse on the unique blood-orange varnish that Stradivarius used to anoint his violins. Along the way, we learn that NapolEon could have died of arsenic poisoning from green wallpaper then in vogue. We are also taught that bureaucratic red tape...
...years, painters have coveted lapis.Ground to powder and mixed with oils, it can render the perfect azure of the sea, the Virgin Mary's robes, or heaven. I wondered why bin Laden wanted all that lapis. Baubles for his four wives? I doubt he was trying to approximate the color of heaven; his experiments have all been in the crimson shades of hellfire...
...Books: The Color of Passion
...that artisans had lost the secret for making the blue in the 800-year-old glass, and that comment stuck with Finlay. During a stint as a journalist in Asia, working as arts editor for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, she broadened the spectrum of her color obsession into ocher, indigo, yellow, green and violet...
...just-18-year-old chemistry student, was looking for a synthetic substitute for quinine, a cure for malaria. Perkin was at home, doing experiments infusing coal tar with hydrogen and oxygen?and had failed. Washing out his test tubes, he noticed a residue that resulted in a "strangely beautiful color"?mauve. Hidden inside a lump of coal tar, writes Finlay, was "the potential for thousands of colors." This is where most of our dyes come from...