For centuries, the colour purple has represented royalty, power and wealth. The Persian emperor Cyrus, wore a purple tunic as his royal uniform. In fact, some Roman emperors even forbade commoners from wearing purple clothes, failing which they would be condemned to death.
The colour enjoyed an elite status for long because the dye that was used to make this colour was very rare. It came from the trading city of Tyre in Phoenicia (now in modern-day Lebanon). More precisely, it was derived from a species of sea snail called Bolinus brandaris, found only in the Tyre region of the Mediterranean Sea. To obtain it, dye-makers had to crack open the snail’s shell. The mucus inside was milky but would turn an intense purple when exposed to air. More than 9000 molluscs were needed to produce just one gram of Tyrian purple. The result was that clothes made from the dye were extremely expensive – a shawl made from Tyrian purple. Silk cost its weight in gold. Hence, only imperial could afford to buy purple-coloured fabric. Purple was also linked to spirituality because monarchs were usually thought to be of divine origin.
Synthetic dyes of purple became widely available only after English chemist William Henry Perkin created a synthetic purple compound by chance, while trying to synthesize the anti-malaria drug quinine in 1856.
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