Color

I recently finished reading the book "Color: A Natural History of the Palette" by Victoria Finlay. It was a good read, she goes one by one about all the colors and talks about what people used for colors and dyes before synthetics and how history was made (wars fought, trade routes established, etc) because of color. She visited many different places around the world in her search of the origin of color. I found it to be very interesting. We take a lot of color for granted because we have synthetic dyes and it's very easy to have what we want.

For instance, did you know why Robin Hood wears green? At the time, there was no true green dye- you first dyed something in yellow and then in blue. Since you were using two dyes, your clothing was twice as expensive plus it was hard to get consistent colors, making it more valuable. So green was for the rich. Robin Hood's wearing green was another way of thumbing his nose at the rich.

Neat, huh?