The recent appearance of Kate Middleton During the Wimbledon tournament wearing a purple dress brought more than the return to public life since the Princess of Wales announced that she is in a cancer treatment. His arrival using a Violet pledge an ancient question that surrounds this range of colors dusted, Why are they related so much to royalty?
And the answer goes far beyond a personal style matter, since the purple color and its variations They have been related to power since millenary times, when pigments that allowed to stain fabrics with This color were extremely scarceexpensive and its use was limited to certain social groups.
Its importance was such that before the nobility will be called as a group of «blue blood», It was said that they had «born in purple», A tone that permeates to plants. To understand how this relationship between purple and the monarchy, we review the story.
A pigment only for elites
The establishment of the use of purple and its range as a status symbol began near the IV AC with the Phoenicians, the civilization that achieved the development of a kind of pigment that was scarce and highly expensive. In an era in which there was a wide variety of tinctures, the Phoenicians developed the Call Purple Tirewhich extracted from a snail from the region that is currently Lebanon. The substance was produced by the mollusk to attack their prey and as a kind of antiseptic to protect their eggs; To obtain it, the Phoenicians extracted her from a animal gland or broke her shell.
The big issue was that To acquire just one gram of said purple substance, thousands of snails had to be gathered And once obtained, you had to undergo a careful drying process to stain fabrics. The meticulous procedure quickly turned it into a coveted tincture that only elites accessed and later the monarchies and even some textiles already dyed with the pigment reached exorbitant prices that could only pay the upper classes.