How the Most Precious Color on Earth Vanished

And inside the quest to rediscover Tyrian purple
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 10, 2023 8:30 AM CST
How the Most Precious Color on Earth Vanished
Perhaps the shade is somewhere in here?   (Getty Images / Natalya Bosyak)

It was the king of all colors—one thought to have been created by the ancient Phoenicians and later cherished by Roman emperors and Cleopatra. Eventually, it vanished. In a fascinating piece for the BBC, Zaria Gorvett delves into the story of Tyrian purple, which was the most precious color on Earth until the recipe was lost in the 15th century. The deep red-purple, akin to "coagulated blood, tinged with black," isn't made as most dyes from antiquity were: by crushing leaves, or insects, or gems. It begins, essentially, as snail mucous, specifically that from three kinds of sea snails in the Murex family. And it isn't purple: It's clear, at least initially. "The problem is that people did not write down the important tricks," is how Maria Melo, a professor of conservation science at Portugal's NOVA University, puts it.

Gorvett writes that the most detailed recounting of the process dates to the 1st century AD and involves salting, fermenting, and cooking the mucous glands. As for why it was so precious, those mucous glands aren't huge, meaning it could require 10,000 snails to make just one gram. The death knell for the dye came in 1453, when the Turks kicked the Romans out of Constantinople, ending the city's industrial-scale production of it. Gorvett's story then zooms to modern day, specifically 2007, when Mohammed Ghassen Nouira was walking on a Tunisian beach and came upon "an intensely reddish-purple liquid" coming from a cracked snail shell. When he opened others he found no such color—until the next day. He has spent the last 16 years working to rediscover the lost process. (Read the full story here.)

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