Story details

The Colour Museum is the world's only museum devoted to colour. Malcolm Brown, Curator at the Colour Museum, worked as a dyer, and then tester, in the industry for 32 years.

In the old processes with the plant dyes like indigo, madder and woad, they had to use what "chemicals" - in inverted commas - were available at the time, there weren't purified products, so they had to use things like camel dung, or whatever they happened to have to hand, and urine - male urine, I think rather than female. Male was acceptable, female urine wasn't any good apparently! And wood ash and things like that. But it meant it was a very smelly process, especially when most of these products were usually left for some days, or weeks, to strengthen as it were. And dyers and tanners were banished usually to the edge of towns, away from the prevailing winds so it didn't blow over. And dyers themselves were quite smelly because it impregnated the skin eventually, and they were linked with fishmongers as being a race that they had to keep apart from, really. So it wasn't a very pleasant trade. I mean, some of the processes now in dyehouses are still quite smelly of course, but hopefully dyers are not ostracised in the same way!

In commercial industry, there's no use for plant dyes, simply because the fastness sometimes leaves a bit to be desired, and to get the quantities of dye you need to dye industrially, you would need acres - many many acres - of indigo or whatever to fulfil the demand, it's not a practical proposition.