title: Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World
author:  Simon Garfield 
description: In 1856, while trying to synthesize artificial quinine, 18-year-old chemistry student William Perkin instead produced a murky residue. Fifty years later, he described the event: he "was about to throw a certain residue away when I thought it might be interesting. The solution of it resulted in a strangely beautiful color." Perkin had stumbled across the world's first aniline dye, a color that became known as mauve.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  ![](9780571265466_cover_epub.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![alt](faber-branding-logo.png)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _Mauve_ is the story of a man who invented a colour, and in the process
  transformed the world around him.
  
  
  Before 1856, the colour in our lives derived from animals, minerals or plants.
  Clothing, paint, print – their reds and blues and blacks came from insects or
  molluscs, roots or leaves, and dyeing was painstaking and expensive. One royal
  procession required ten million dead insects. But in 1856 a chemist called
  William Perkin discovered a way to produce colour in a factory.
  
  
  Perkin found mauve by chance, at the age of 18, working on a treatment for
  malaria in his tiny home laboratory in London. Instead of artificial quinine
  he made a dark oily sludge, but it was a sludge that turned silk a beautiful
  light purple. The colour was unique; it became the most desirable shade in the
  fashion houses of Paris and London.
  
  
  Mauve led to new crimsons, violets, blues and green