An 18-year-old’s failed medicine set off a fashion craze
In 1856 a student trying to make a malaria drug produced a purple stain instead, and within two years Europe was wearing mauve.
In the spring of 1856 a young chemistry student called William Henry Perkin went home for the Easter holiday and carried on an experiment.
His teacher, the German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann, had mused that it might be possible to make quinine, the malaria drug then extracted from tree bark, from coal-tar chemicals. Perkin, aged about 18, tried to oxidise aniline to get there. He got an ugly black sludge instead. But when he tried to clean the flask with alcohol, it came out a glowing purple.
From stain to industry
Perkin saw that the colour could dye silk, and that it did not wash out easily. He patented it on 26 August 1856 and, with money from his father, built a factory at Greenford Green near London. He called the colour mauve, from the French name for the mallow flower, and the dye mauveine.
Purple had once been fearfully expensive, because it came from shellfish. Now it could be made from coal tar.
How a colour caught on
The dye needed a famous wearer. Around the end of 1857 Empress Eugénie of France decided mauve suited her, and in 1858 Queen Victoria wore it too. Soon the craze was so widespread that Punch joked about “mauve measles”.
It is worth adding a small correction before you share this: mauve was not the first colour made artificially. It was the first commercially successful synthetic dye, which is a different, and still remarkable, claim. It opened the door to the chemical industry that later gave us many medicines and materials.
Bring it up
“The first synthetic dye was an accident by a teenager hunting for a malaria cure, and it made the whole of Europe go purple.”
Follow the thread
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