SPEAKER_02: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather from soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear and T-shirts are the number one, two and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I and use code 99 P I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I code 99 P I. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. My boy Maslow's favorite color is red. My boy Carver's favorite color is blue. Carver is okay with the color red, but Maslow hates blue. They're twins and for those who don't know them well, the color they wear is how people tell them apart. These colors were not chosen for them. It just happened. It is fundamental to who they are. When you're a kid, your favorite color is one of maybe five of the most important aspects of your personality. Over the course of our lives, the fervor for a specific favorite color tends to die down. But over the course of human history, the search for the brightest splash of color has been a defining feature of our species. Cassia St. Clair is fascinated by color, how it's made, what it means, and how it defines us. She wrote a beautiful book called The Secret Lives of Color that I love so much that I invited her in to talk with me. And she's riveting. So this episode is just that. My conversation with Cassia St. Clair, all about the secret lives of color. So, Cassia, how did you begin becoming obsessed with colors and what made you want to write a whole book about the lives of color?
SPEAKER_05: Yes, I'm lucky that I came from quite a creative family. My mother was a florist and I have very vivid memories of kind of messing around in her flower shop when I was little. And I would be given kind of like the offcuts to make little bouquets from. So that was, I think, the beginning of my love of color. But I became interested in it academically at university because I was studying 18th century women's history. And more specifically, what women wore to masquerade balls during the 18th century. And one of the things that I loved about studying this very niche topic is the fact that I got to read so many journals and letters about what people were planning to wear or had worn at parties. And, you know, it was sort of filled with gossip. And something that really struck me time and again was the fact that friends were using color terms in these letters and diaries and accounts that were completely unfamiliar to me. And I would have to go away and do an awful lot of research to try and recreate what that color might look like. And sometimes it was just impossible for me. You know, I simply wouldn't ever be able to find out exactly what that color looked like. And the fact that the color vocabulary had just shifted, you know, I was in London, I was in the same city where these people were writing about, and it really wasn't that long ago historically. And yet the color terminology had changed really almost completely. The colors that were fashionable then were not colors that I even recognized. And that just blew my mind and sort of continued to be of interest to me. And I would always be fascinated by it. And I mean, in your book, you talk a lot about the relationship between language and color. And one of the most interesting things to me was how different languages divide up the color spectrum differently.
SPEAKER_05: Yes, absolutely. So if you think about a color wheel or, you know, if you think about a way of representing all the colors we could possibly see, it wouldn't be in a straight line. It would be kind of in a random blur and there'd be areas where, you know, blue fades into green or red fades into pink or purple. And the dividing lines, the bit where, you know, different cultures decide this is red and this is blue and this is purple, that can really change. And it can change on an individual basis and also on a linguistic basis. So various languages have divided up the spectrum differently into more or fewer groups, but also in different ways. So for example, Russian speakers have a word for darker blue and a word for lighter blue, for example. And some languages only divide the color spectrum into kind of three or four groups.
SPEAKER_02: Right. I was struck by this in your book that in the section on pink, that there's a word for pink and there's no word for light yellow or light green. It's just, it's so strange that it has its own nomenclature.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's a real sort of cultural oddity. And particularly, you know, pink now plays such an outsized role in our culture, both because it's associated with women and girls, you know, for good and ill. But also we just, we just seem to really love it in Western culture. It comes up a lot. And you're right, you know, far more than you would think of, say, a pale green or pale blue.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I mean, there's a sense that these colors exist kind of as concepts, but your book, The Secret Lives of Color, is really about color in the material world, about the pigments themselves.
SPEAKER_02: And so I kind of want to go through a few of those pigments to sort of tease out these types of stories that we get. And I was thinking that we could just start with red because it seems to be the most universally loved color through history. Why is that?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's a really interesting one. So one of the questions that I get asked, you know, without fail every time I do a talk about color is whether colors, you know, make humans have a sort of real physical response. And quite often this idea is kind of, you know, slightly junk science, you know, like pink makes you calm or, you know, whatever. And it's very hard to really pin down valid scientific data on this. But red is the color where the most tests have been done. And the most tests have sort of come back with fairly compelling results that, yes, red does have some form of measurable impact. And perhaps that's why you get it so widely across so many different cultures, because it does seem to make us respond in this sort of really elemental way. So one of the classic examples of this is that if you look at all the games of football or soccer that have been played since the Second World War in the UK, teams that are wearing red have won on average more than they should have done statistically. And there was another similar study done on the Olympics as well, you know, the Athens Olympic Games on combat sports. And again, you had similar results, which it does just seem incredible, but also makes you think that if you're ever to play a sport, you should definitely make sure that you're the team wearing red.
SPEAKER_02: And red is also one of the oldest colors. Can you talk about how people made red in the ancient world?
SPEAKER_05: Sure. So one of the oldest pigments, all these red pigments that we know about is hematite, which essentially you can kind of think of like rust. It's iron oxide. You find it in ochres, reddish ochres. And the sort of chemical compounds from which it's made are really common in the Earth's crust. You get kind of red earth, red tinted earths, you know, geographically in really widespread areas. So it's not surprising in a way that it's cropped up in a lot of different archaeological contexts all over the world, in China, Mesoamerica, North Africa, Europe. It's cropped up again and again and again. It's so universal that it was sort of dubbed by a 1980s anthropologist as one of the sort of the two consistent markers of kind of human evolution along with tool making. That was the other one.
SPEAKER_02: So wearing hematite red and tool making are the things that make humans human. Yes. That's amazing. But hematite sort of falls out of fashion because we find brighter versions of red.
SPEAKER_05: So one of the reasons why I love color as a subject, you know, I'm just so fascinated by it, is because humans have always gone to the most extreme and extraordinary lengths to get their hands on brighter and more interesting shades. And that's really evident when you talk about red. So, you know, yes, they have this really widely available red earth that they can sort of dig up from almost anywhere in the world. But that is not enough. It's not bright enough. And so somewhere along the line, someone discovers that if you crush up a type of scale insect that can be found in Europe, it's called the Kermis scale insect, that you can produce a really quite vibrant red dye. And this was highly popular on clothing. It was used as a kind of status symbol and it was also very expensive. And because the fineness of a cloth and the expense of a dye went together, there's no point in having a really beautifully manufactured woolen cloth and then dyeing it a color that's associated with poverty. A particular type of very fine cloth called scarlet was usually dyed with these scale insects, which was usually dyed this very vibrant red. And so eventually the name of the cloth, which is scarlet woolen cloth, became kind of synonymous with the red that it was so often dyed. And that's kind of how the name scarlet and the color red came together. It was actually sort of borrowed from a very fine woolen cloth.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow. That's amazing. There's another red. Can you help me pronounce this? This is like Cochineal? How do you say? Yeah, Cochineal. Cochineal.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and it's very similar actually to scarlet because it's also made with a scale insect. But this one, rather than being European, is very common in South and Central America and was used very widely by Aztecs and Incas in their culture. And again, it was associated with rulers and power, but it was also sort of a part of their kind of taxation system in a way. So when there were sort of vassal states, the vassal states would be expected to give their rulers certain numbers of sacks of Cochineal dye or the dried bugs sort of every month or two months, depending on how wealthy this vassal state was. So it was really sort of highly valued and really embedded in the culture.
SPEAKER_02: How did this color interact with colonization and trade around the world?
SPEAKER_05: So colors and colorants have been one of those things that people go and take over other countries and exploit other areas of the world for. You know, they're very often natural resources that people are desperate to get their hands on and they can make an awful lot of money from back home. And so, you know, Cochineal was one of the products that the Spanish were desperate to get their hands on in order to get this red colorant back to Europe, where it was actually many times stronger than the kermes dye that had been originally used to color scarlet cloth. Cochineal is much stronger and so it's much more cost effective and great sums of money could be made and were made in the export and use of this dye. And it took like 70,000 bugs to get a pound of Cochineal, right?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I mean, with all these dyes that are made out of animals or animal products, you know, it's really the poor creature that's involved in the making of the color really does get completely hammered. You know, very often it takes an awful lot of them to produce not very much dye or not very much colorant. And often you find, you know, them being driven to the brink of extinction just because people are so keen to get their hands on the color. And do we still use insects like these to make pigments today?
SPEAKER_02: Yes. So there is a slightly sort of grim side to this particular color in that it's, you know, because it's a natural red colorant and also because it's, you know, it's really highly pigmented.
SPEAKER_05: It has been used in kind of food and also cosmetics. So if you were to look at your strawberry yogurt or something like that, you might see that it's been colored with carmenic acid or you might see it down as the colorant E120. And that is in fact, cochineal bugs. Whoa. Okay. So you see E120 that you're eating bugs.
SPEAKER_05: Yes. But if you think about it, all the colorants that are used in food, I mean, you know, maybe we're all different, but you know, if you replace E120 with another colorant, the likelihood is that that colorant might well be an extract from like a coal tar sludge, which is where a lot of other colorants come from. So, you know, I don't know, coal tar or bug blood. You can eat coal, you can eat bugs. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_02: So as you mentioned, the color for a pigment, it can be pretty rare in nature and it tends to require the wholesale slaughter of an entire species to make it happen. Which sort of brings me to Tyrian purple. Can you talk about Tyrian purple?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so this is one of my favorite stories from this book because many people have this automatic association between royalty and purple. And it's one of those kind of cultural links that maybe you don't think about too much. But actually, the link goes really far back and it is based on this amazing purple dye called Tyrian purple. Again, it's an animal-based colorant and it comes from two varieties of shellfish that are native to the Mediterranean. And if you were to go and find one of these shellfish, they're quite spiny, so you'd have to be careful when you picked it up. And if you were to crack it open, you would see that there's kind of a pale gland that runs across the back of the shellfish. And this gland contains a single drop of liquid that smells a little bit like garlic, apparently. It's really unpleasant smelling like garlic breath. And this liquid is phenomenal when it's exposed to the light. If you were to sort of rub it on a piece of cloth and expose that piece of cloth to the light, it would immediately change color. It would turn yellow and then green and then blue and then finally purple. The color that it produces is very distinctive and very vibrant. And this was the dye beloved by the ancient world and became, again, because it was very expensive, really associated with power and royalty. So again, you get lots of legislation dictating who can and can't wear it. There's a kind of a famous story about the Emperor Nero, who turned up to a recital and saw a woman in the audience wearing a Tyrian purple gown. And she wasn't of the right class or status to wear it. And so he had her taken from the room and whipped and had all her lands confiscated because he saw this as a real way of usurping his own power. Because she was taking the power bestowed by this color. It was so potent a symbol, which is kind of amazing. But again, like the poor scale bugs, the four shellfish went through horrors because of humans desire for this purple. So, you know, it takes about 250,000 of these shellfish to produce just an ounce of dye. And so people were hunting these shellfish to extinction. You know, they were catching and using so many of these shellfish that actually they kind of almost formed geographical features. If you go back to some of the areas of the world that were producing this dye in the classical era, the discarded shells have almost become kind of hills outside the town, very often downwind of the town. All the dye works which were generally associated downwind so that the citizens who ended up wearing the Tyrian purple gowns wouldn't be bothered by the smell of the manufacture.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_02: Wow. And so when did purple kind of lose its association? I mean, it's always been associated with royalty, but when did it become acceptable for a common folk to wear it without getting whipped?
SPEAKER_05: Well, Tyrian purple, both because the shellfish became incredibly rare, but also because of political turmoil around the Mediterranean, which kind of really disrupted the manufacture of the dye. Tyrian purple itself, you know, largely disappeared from view. Purple kind of goes into a little bit of a decline until the mid 19th century when an entirely new purple dye was discovered completely by accident. And this sort of led to a revival.
SPEAKER_02: And what's that? What's that I call?
SPEAKER_05: So the the new purple dye that was discovered in the mid 19th century is called mauve. And it was discovered by an 18 year old scientist who was at home on holiday and kind of using his his vacation time to try and find a synthetic version of quinine, which was a cure for malaria. At that time, malarial agues were sort of really common in Europe. And it was thought that being able to produce a synthetic quinine would be kind of a huge moneymaker for anyone who could discover it. So that's what he was doing. He was spending his his days, you know, working on this in his father's attic. And on one of his failed experiments, what he ended up with in his in his test tube was a sort of purple sludge. And I think, you know, he definitely knew this wasn't quinine. But I think possibly because he was interested in art and had painted in in his younger days, he decided that rather than just throwing this purple sludge away, he would add a bit of water to it and then he would dip in a piece of cloth. And what he discovered was that he had completely accidentally made a really colorfast and very vibrant purple dye. And this was incredible. In fact, it led to a whole revolution in synthetic dyes. You know, it was the it was the first synthetic dye that could be manufactured, you know, not using any natural components. So no bugs, no bezels, no poor shellfish. And it just allowed purple to be worn by a much greater section of society than ever before.
SPEAKER_02: And so the invention of mauve really just impacted the entire textile industry because of this possibility. So it opened up an artificial dye. Is that the right way to put it?
SPEAKER_05: Yes, although, you know, you'd think it would be kind of immediate. You'd think that, you know, the whole world would very quickly cotton on, if you'll excuse the pun, to the value of this of this synthetic dye. But in fact, it took a while for this scientist who is called William Perkin to persuade textile dyers that this was the way forward because they were used to working with natural plant extracts. And the idea of a synthetic dye was really alien to them. And it was in fact, you know, his success only really happened slightly by accident because he persuaded a couple of textile mills to use this dye. And one of them ended up selling a gown to some members of royalty. So Princess Eugénie wore a gown in this purple and then the real clincher was Queen Victoria wore a mauve gown to her one of her daughter's weddings. And this got sort of greatly reported in the press. There's new colour. And it became a complete fashion trend, so much so that a year after Queen Victoria had worn this gown, a sort of satirical English newspaper reported that London had become afflicted with the mauve measles because so many people were wearing this colour. I think I was intrigued, especially by the colour green in your book, because it seems like it is this thing that's so fundamental to nature, it's everywhere, but it was historically really challenging to make.
SPEAKER_02: Could you explain why that is?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. So although, like you say, we kind of look around the world and it seems like there's a lot of green in our world. In fact, it's very difficult to make stable, vibrant green colourants, either as pigments in paint, but also in dyes as well. And there were some who were sort of adept at it and very often artists who were able to make vibrant greens would make them by layering various different colours on top of each other. And dyers would have to sort of again work with several different dye colours, which was, you know, in the medieval world, the mixing of dyes was really frowned on. Why is that? It's often because of guild restrictions, because they were very protective of their guild skills. And so a dyers guild that dealt with woad or indigo blue dyes were very reluctant to also work with yellow colourants. And so the mixing of blue and yellow to create a green was sort of almost seen as devilish and really transgressive in many ways.
SPEAKER_02: That's amazing. Because it's like something that, you know, any kid with paint knows how to do almost instinctively.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it is an odd one. It's one of those things where you suddenly realise how far away you are from the people you're studying when you're reading these documents and you're looking at these kind of debates surrounding it and prosecutions, you know, the prosecution of people making green cloth. Right.
SPEAKER_02: So artists were able to find good reds and good yellows, but greens were kind of hard to find. How did they end up finding the right green for painting?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so greens were elusive. Some artists were able to create vibrant greens by using kind of intermediary layers. And, you know, it was a real kind of trade skill. It was a closely guarded secret by some artists, you know, the secret to their green, their ability to create these beautiful colours. But there aren't really very many stable, natural green pigments that artists have access to, which meant that when they started being created in this kind of rush of new chemicals and experimentation in the 19th century, the creation of new greens, they were taken up really rapidly and without much thought or care for what actually was contained in these greens. In particular, a green called Sheila's green. Could you tell us about the uptake of that and the horrible effects of that?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so this was created by a Swedish scientist in 1775. And because there was this dearth of bright green pigments on the market, and this was relatively cheap, it got taken up by artists and wallpaper manufacturers and dressmakers incredibly quickly, well within a decade. It was kind of everywhere. One of my favourite stories is that the writer Charles Dickens came back from a trip to Naples where he'd seen a lot of this green being used and decided that he was going to decorate his entire house, this one particular shade of green, you know, from the basement to the attic. And very luckily for him, and for us, who have, you know, read and enjoyed his work, his wife dissuaded him and said that she thought it was disgusting colour. And, you know, he ended up, you know, not decorating his entire house, this particular sort of grassy emerald green. And I say luckily for us, because it was discovered that this pigment that was made, you know, from arsenic was really poisonous or could be really poisonous. It was found that in samples of wallpaper that were, you know, only a few inches across contained enough arsenic to kill two adults. One of the industries that this green was really popular in was the artificial flower industry, because obviously it was used to sort of paint the stems and the leaves of these artificial flowers. And a girl called Matilda, who was quite young, I think she was only 18 or 19, started working in an artificial flower factory and very quickly became very ill. And a doctor in London started looking into the causes of this because, you know, she had a really disparate array of symptoms and eventually discovered that it was this green colourant. But by that time it was far too late. It was all over the country, all over the world. It was used in wallpaper and dress fabric, you know, you name it. It was painted this, you know, arsenic laden green. But one of the most famous supposed victims of this green is actually Napoleon. It was found out after his death that there was quite a lot of green in the wallpaper that was used to decorate his rooms. And it was thought for a long time that this arsenic green might have contributed to his death. Although subsequent tests have actually shown they managed to find sort of samples of his hair throughout his life, goodness only knows how. But they tested all these samples of hair and found that actually he had really high arsenic levels throughout his life and that it didn't rise suspiciously just before his death. Although I'm sure, you know, being in a room covered with arsenic wallpaper can't have helped his health one little bit.
SPEAKER_02: And one of the strange things I think you learn reading your book is the place of blue in history. How popular was blue as a colour throughout history?
SPEAKER_05: So now it's one of the most popular, if not the most popular colour globally among men and women. And it's kind of seen as being, you know, inspiring trust and confidence and all good things. And you kind of, you're tempted to kind of push that back into history. But in fact, if you look at the ancient world and kind of really up until the 14th century, blue was seen as unlucky, uncouth, unfashionable, associated with kind of barbarism, particularly in the West this is, in Western thought, in Western culture. And it was only with the kind of the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary in Christianity, because she was popularly depicted wearing, you know, blue garments, that blue began to sort of have this kind of cultural resurgence in Western thought and suddenly became pretty quickly a really popular colour. That's amazing. So who decided to depict her wearing blue? I mean, who made that decision to change the world?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so it's kind of incredible. So around about the same time that the cult of the Virgin Mary was growing, the use of this particular pigment, ultramarine, which was made from lapis lazuli, was growing and being kind of perfected. And again, because it was this really vivid colour and was incredibly expensive, it became a way of artists and patrons of showing their devotion to the Virgin Mary by depicting her in this really expensive, luminous pigment that came from a very long way away. You know, even its name, ultra ultramarine, comes from ultra and mare beyond the sea. The pigment itself kind of has this, you know, amazingly exotic connotations. And that became bound up with the cult of the Virgin Mary and the two kind of bounced off each other and brought each other up in a funny sort of way.
SPEAKER_02: Could you describe how ultramarine was made?
SPEAKER_05: Sure. So many people are familiar with lapis lazuli, which is the semi-precious stone that is the kind of the raw material for making ultramarine. It's kind of a really gorgeous dark blue stone that's used a lot in jewellery and kind of looks a little bit like the night sky. It's really deep blue and it often has kind of tracery of white that look a little bit like clouds and also can often contain little pieces of fool's gold that look a little bit like stars. It's really beautiful. But in order to get from this very gorgeous semi-precious stone to a pigment takes an awful lot of hard work. The mines, the Afghanistan mines where the lapis lazuli came from were incredibly remote. The stone would have to be loaded onto donkeys and camels, taken across the Silk Route to the coast of the Mediterranean, put on ships and they would usually fetch up in Venice, which is sort of the port where so many luxury goods came into Europe. And once an artist had bought his piece of lapis lazuli, the work was still far from over. The stone had to be ground down to a powder and then it had to be purified. Those bits of fool's gold and the white traceries that I mentioned in the original stone, those elements had to be removed because they turned the blue colourant rather dull and a bit ashy. And the way that was done is the powdered blue stone would be mixed with mastic wax and then it would be kneaded, almost like you're sort of kneading a dough to make bread in a solution of lye. And as the dough was kneaded and the flakes of blue would fall out to the bottom of the lye solution and you'd then be able to tip off the lye and you'd have bright blue sediment that could then be used to create an amazing pigment ultramarine that was just beloved of artists in, you know, medieval artists and artists in the Renaissance. It's one of the kind of the classic pigments that was used during this time. And very often when you see a painting of the Virgin Mary, she'll be swathed in a rich blue cloth. And usually that cloth will be painted using ultramarine. And it's also kind of at the root of one of my favourite kind of colour facts, which is that, you know, although now we think of pink as being for girls and blue as being for boys, in fact, if you were to go back sort of a, you know, just a little over a century, a century and a half, it was the other way round pink and was sort of seen as pale red and was much more associated with boys and blue because of its association with the Virgin Mary was seen as the more feminine and dainty colour. Mm hmm. Wow. The process of extracting and purifying these colours seems so arduous and speaks to the desire for the end product that they would go through such efforts to try to create it.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_02: You've identified this like real human pursuit of like basically, you know, food, shelter and the brightest colour imaginable. It's like, it seemed to be just part of ingrained in our DNA.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we love shiny, bright colours and we are prepared to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to have them. So I want to talk about orange because I need to know once and for all what came first, the colour or the fruit?
SPEAKER_02: The fruit came first.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, the fruit came first and as it travelled across the world, it brought its name and its colour with it, which is rather nice. But before in the English language, orange was called orange. It was actually called yellow red, which kind of makes sense, but isn't. Yeah. It's a bit long winded.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_02: So let's talk broadly about the colour black. I think people think of black as one thing, but there are lots of different shades of black. So could you describe what black is and what black means in the world?
SPEAKER_05: Yes, it's a funny thing that if you go into a paint shop or, you know, clothing store, you can find so many hundreds, thousands of variants of white and we can call them cream or ivory or pearl and we've got lots of different names for them. And yet we just sort of collapse so many subtle blacks into one very big overarching label. And in fact, black has many different subtleties of tone, you know, as white does. And yet we just don't, you know, our vocabulary for black is really poor. And that, you know, was one of the colours that I was most worried about when I was writing the book. I was like, oh, you know, am I going to get to this one chapter and just have nothing to say? And I found completely the opposite. I found I became frustrated. I wanted people of the past to have been as excited about black as they were about reds and blues because it seemed to me that there was just there was such richness there that it seemed a shame that we, you know, I didn't have the vocabulary to do it justice. Well, so when you talked earlier about the arrival of mauve or the arrival of green into the world and how the world just kind of exploded with excitement and how amazing it is to think of discovering or seeing a colour for the first time.
SPEAKER_02: The closest analogue I can come to is when I saw Vantablack for the first time, which almost breaks your brain with how black it is. Can you describe what Vantablack is and how you encountered it?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so I guess you should probably start with the name Vantablack. It sounds sort of very space age, but actually it's kind of comes from a useful acronym. The Vanta stands for vertically aligned nanotube array. And essentially Vantablack is it's not really a colour. It's more of a substance that absorbs more light than anything else on earth. And that is because of its structure, because of these vertically aligned tubes, tiny, tiny, tiny filaments of carbon fibre. The light gets kind of absorbed between and amongst these fibres and can't get out. It gets trapped. And so very little light is reflected.
SPEAKER_02: Why did they make this substance?
SPEAKER_05: Well, it was created for kind of a really specific purpose. So it was created for satellite guidance systems. The idea being that, you know, in order for a satellite to know where it is in space, it takes an image of what it can see, of what's in front of it. And then that can be kind of matched up with a map of the sky and then the satellite will kind of know where it is. And the blacker that you can get the internal workings around the camera navigation systems, the better, because it means there's sort of less distraction and the image will be clearer and therefore it'll be easier for the satellite to navigate. And so there's been this kind of creation of super blacks by NASA and various other people who work with satellites or make satellites. But a British company sort of out of nowhere discovered a much blacker black than had ever been discovered before. You know, it only reflects about 0.065% of the visible spectrum. So, you know, it really is uncannily black and it's far too dark. It's far too light absorbing for it to give our eyes any information about the kind of environment we're in. So what I mean by that is when I first saw a sample of Vantablack, it was kind of grown onto a sample of onto a piece of crumpled up aluminium foil. And when you looked at the reverse, you could see all the different planes. You could see that it was a scrumpled piece of aluminium foil from the different planes of light. And that gave you information about where you were in relation to the tin foil and the fact that it was scrumpled and all the rest of it. When it was turned over to expose the Vantablack coated side, suddenly what you saw was what looked like a kind of a mistake, like an acme black hole because your eyes weren't being given enough information. So what you saw was even though you knew that this piece of aluminium foil was 3D, you know, had lots of contours, you couldn't discern that all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all you could see was just a black hole. And that was incredibly uncanny. Both me sort of completely mad seeing it in a sample in a lab, even though I knew exactly what I was going there to see, I went there expecting it. And yet still I couldn't quite wrap my head around it. But it really shocked people. And I spoke to the scientist who was involved in its creation and he said he was getting calls from people soon after it had been discovered, telling him that this creation must in some way be associated with the devil, because anything that black that gave back that little information to our eyes must be intrinsically evil, which is such an odd knee jerk reaction. But in fact, it's incredible. Yeah. But it's also, it totally hearkens back to all these stories that you've told us,
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_02: that these associations, these primal associations we have with these colours, it sounds exactly like, you know, the alchemists told that they can't mix blue and yellow, or they're doing the work of the devil. Yeah, maybe we haven't moved on all that far after all. Maybe not. I actually had a question about the design of the book itself. It's really beautiful. And one of the coolest parts is that you have a coloured stripe on the edge of the pages that go with each colour story. But I couldn't help but think about how stressful it must have been. You know, you have to be right on the money that you got the right pigment, you know, in the printing process and everything. Did this something that kept you up at night?
SPEAKER_05: Yes, it did. I'm not going to tell you which colour it is that gives me, that still gives me sleepless nights. But I had anxiety nightmares about, you know, people coming at me and saying, you know, sky blue is wrong or, you know, whatever it is. I just thought, oh no, I thought I'm going to get myself into so much trouble. And what was so stupid is that, you know, part of the argument of the book is that there is no true ultramarine. Colours are cultural creations and they're kind of shifting all the time, sort of like tectonic plates. Colour is not a precise thing. It's changing, it's living, it's constantly being redefined and argued over. And that's part of the magic of it. That's part of why I love it, but it's also part of why it is infuriating. And particularly when you find yourself in the position of having to choose the right colour for each and every page of your book, you end up finding the whole thing completely ridiculous and cursing the fact that you were interested in colour in the first place.
SPEAKER_01: Music
SPEAKER_02: A final story from Cassia St. Clair about the colour blue, an art forgery and Nazis when we come back.
SPEAKER_01: Music
SPEAKER_02: If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of super foods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend or your favourite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue dot org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva dot com, the home for every brand. With one of the most amazing stories of art forgery, here again is Katia St. Clair. Just after the Second World War, a lot of people in Europe were being prosecuted for collaboration and those who'd collaborated with the Nazis during the war were being investigated.
SPEAKER_05: And one of those was an art dealer called Van Meegeren who had sold an awful lot of canvases of Vermeers and various other artists to, you know, Nazi collectors and even to kind of, you know, Hitler's own art collection itself. The prosecution sort of began of this art dealer and he turned around and said, actually, you know, you shouldn't be prosecuting me. You should think of me as a hero because far from selling out, you know, amazing Dutch owned art to the Nazis, what I was actually doing is I was, you know, creating these masterpieces from scratch. I'm a forger. I was never selling Vermeers to the Nazis. I was just ripping them off. And he had made a fortune during, you know, this period. He'd made, I think the modern figure is somewhere in the region of around $33 million that he'd made by selling these, you know, supposed artworks. So he found himself in this really odd position of having to kind of prove that he was guilty of forgery in order to prove that he was innocent of collaboration. And the pigment that eventually kind of proved that he had forged these pictures, which by this time were in, you know, all the sort of most well respected art galleries all over Europe, he'd fooled an awful lot of people as well as the Nazis. But the pigment that this all turned on was cobalt blue because it had been discovered a long time after Vermeer's death and yet was discovered to have been used in this one particular Vermeer, fake Vermeer that he had created. And so he managed to prove that he was guilty of forgery because of the presence of cobalt blue, where in fact he had meant to use ultramarine, which was, you know, the pigment that Vermeer would have used. Right. That's so good. Well, this is so much fun. Thank you so much. I enjoy this immensely.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, it's my pleasure. It was really great fun.
SPEAKER_02: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is the senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Avery Truffleman, Taryn Mazza, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, Sharif Yousif, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit, too. But you can probably surmise the show's favorite color at 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
SPEAKER_00: Is there any trip more delightfully unpredictable than a road trip? After all, who knows where the road will take you? Who knows where you'll stay? Will it be that no-name hotel that says no to every request? No, you'll have to find the elevators yourself.
SPEAKER_04: Or maybe the one with the extra stale Danish for breakfast.
SPEAKER_00: I think I broke a tooth. And you want a place you can always rely on wherever the road takes you? It matters where you stay.
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Hampton by Hilton. Don't forget about our free hot breakfast.
SPEAKER_00: Hilton. For the stay.
SPEAKER_06: With the McDonald's app, you can get your favorite thing delivered to your door. So you can eat your favorite thing while you watch your favorite thing at home. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. At participating McDonald's, delivery prices may be higher than at restaurants. Delivery and other fees may apply.
SPEAKER_03: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Froot Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Froot Loops, just so you know.
SPEAKER_04: Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Froot Loops. The same way you say studio.
SPEAKER_03: That's not how we say it.
SPEAKER_04: Froot Loops. Find the loopy side.
