Everything is Synthetic.

The discovery of both Prussian Blue and mauve were byproducts of mistakes.

(I'm reminding myself this because one of the awkward things about writing a newsletter, which is based on ongoing research, is that you are going to make some very public mistakes.)

I'm very used to reading about the distinction between natural and synthetic.

We have natural materials and synthetic materials, dyes, and pigments. Plant-based dyes are considered natural. Dyes which are concocted in a laboratory are considered to be synthetic.

Seems simple enough.

My understanding had always been that Prussian Blue was the first synthetic dye. With that introduction, you would not be surprised to learn that my understanding was wrong.

I desperately wanted to see their research, considering that I don’t think that premixed paints even existed in the 18th century, and every house painter would simply mix their own. The first synthetic paint Prussian Blue was only invented in the 18th century, so that tells us about their selections.
– The Irrelevance of Historical Colors - March 7th, 2024

I, for one, was surprised to discover an "ancient" journal article (published a full year before I was born) titled "Synthetic Blue Pigments: Ninth to Sixteenth Centuries". The authors seem to be including any color process which undergoes a chemical synthesis.

It brought a variety of medieval sources with recipes for iron-, silver-, copper-, alum-, and vegetal-based blues. One popular method was by using vinegar and other ingredients to break down the copper.

Laboratory Color

So much of what we normally describe as synthetic dyes were originally made from extracting benzene from coal tar, and synthesizing toxic aniline chemicals, which were the basis for a veritable rainbow of dyes in the mid-to-late-19th century, starting with mauve and magenta.

(Un)natural Color

My difficulty is that if the use of any chemical process whatsoever causes the pigment to become synthetic, which is fair, as it is the product of a chemical synthesis, then even many of the so-called natural dyes would be considered to be synthetic.

Mollusk

The mollusk-based purples (like Tyrian or Royal Purple) and blues do rely on the use of sunlight to cause chemical reactions to achieve the desired hues.

Indigo

Indigo and woad require use of fermentation, oxidation, and even lime or lye to create the beautiful blues.

Cochineal

Cochineal is boiled in either ammonia or sodium carbonate, and then combined with a mordant like alum. In fact, most natural dyes use some of mordant, or fixative chemical, to bind to cloth and other surfaces.

Smalt

Moreover, the article even referred to ground cobalt glass, commonly known as "smalt", to be synthetic. Smalt is prepared by adding cobalt oxide, cobalt carbonate, or cobalt aluminate to a glass melt, before grinding down the resulting blue glass to be used as a pigment.

This seems to be synthetic, in a purely linguistic sense, ie. the combining of multiple materials in creation of the pigment.

This is a process which was discovered during antiquity. The first part of the process seems to be identical to what they did around the first century CE to make Lithuanian Blue glass beads.

Ultramarine

But that would make nearly every single pigment, including Ultramarine, synthetic. The lapis lazuli was not simply ground into making Ultramarine. According to Cennino Cennini, lye was a crucial part of the process, as was pine resin, mastic, and fresh wax.

But I know that Ultramarine is not what we would call a synthetic blue. The case could be made that the hue existed before any of the other materials were added, and that is the distinction.

Functional Aphasia

There is probably a more accurate pairing than natural and synthetic, but I am at a loss of what it should be. At the end of this, I'm still not sure what the correct distinction should be between traditional methods of preparing dyes and pigments before the 18th century, and the shift to laboratory-made dyes, beginning with Prussian Blue.

While the terms natural and synthetic are great for branding, they fall short at providing a meaningful distinction between the dyes created from organic materials as opposed to the dyes created from inorganic materials. And even that is not a helpful distinction.

Everyone is curious.

For what it's worth, I don't either like the term "laboratory-made dyes".

The more I research about this history of color-making, the more I appreciate how each culture is curious and experimental in their own way.

While they may have not had a laboratory in the 1st or 13th centuries, by their results, we can see that they followed the scientific method. The scientific method is just a semi-formal way to describe the process of curiosity.

The case can be made that the original goal behind the discoveries of both Prussian Blue and mauve had nothing to do with searching for color, but rather something else.

They were both mistakes, byproducts of which changed the world, or at least, added some much-needed color to it.