★★★★★ Bugs and beauty

A Perfect Red

Amy Butler Greenfield

I was reminded of Amy Butler Greenfield's A Perfect Red by the novel I am now reading: Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey, which takes place in a fantasy world in which society is stratified by color and its perception. The first of these books reveals that the second is more real than you might naively think.

A Perfect Red is one of the best of a nonfiction genre I call the history of substances. Other excellent examples are The True History of Chocolate, Spice: The History of a Temptation, and A History of the World in 6 Glasses. These books reveal that much of the most fascinating parts of history concern materials. And I don't just mean material wealth -- i.e., having more of the kind of stuff we obviously want, such as food and drink. I mean very specific materials.

A Perfect Red is about carmine or cochineal (two names for the same thing), the only really good natural red dye. Greenfield explains that in the Old World, red clothing, or indeed red ANYTHING was a tremendous luxury in ancient times because it was so difficult to find a vibrant red that didn't fade. Thus, red was the color of royalty. When the English clothed their soldiers in red, it was a statement of power and wealth.

Red became available with with the discovery of the New World. The indigenous people had a brilliant, colorfast red dye, whose origin they kept secret for centuries. (Indeed, this is a recurring theme in the history of substances -- so many valuable new things were introduced to the Old World from the New: chocolate, chili peppers, potatoes, maize...) Cochineal, it turns out, is a complex chemical substance that comes from an insect, the cochineal bug. Indigenous Americans noticed that the crushed bugs made a brilliant red stain. The bugs are very difficult to grow artificially, so this remained a New World monopoly for many years.

In the mid 19th century organic chemists first began to make synthetic dyes. Greenfield makes clear something I had never really understood before -- why the so-called "aniline dyes" were such a big deal. Carmine was too complex at first for the chemists, but eventually they figured it out. Now we live in a world where anyone can have bright red stuff.

A Perfect Red is history as fascinating as a novel.

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