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(VOL. 2 – 2003) |
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 MORE PURPLE!" |
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 How about lilac?" |
In celebration of a color
that used to be just purple
By SID FRIGAND
of TheColumnists.com
“Whatever happened to the color purple?” I mused, as I sat in front of my TV listening to Jessye Norman's soaring paean to our nation, “America the Beautiful.” I usually don't have much patience anymore to muse--although I must confess to an occasional rumination--but something clicked on my muse button when Norman sang and intoned Katharine Lee Bates' century-old lyrics extolling America's “purple mountain majesties/ above the fruited plain!”
In America's own Victorian era, “Kathy Lee” (does, every century have to have one?) did not think the color purple was déclassé. But something has happened to our culture: We live in a world of euphemism and market hype where purple now describes the prose in advice columns in Hustler magazine. Instead, a host of market-driven terms like plum and grape have come to mean the color purple. Today “America's” majestic mountain would probably be magenta. That's quite the comedown from past centuries, when purple was exalted and used to connote regal status. “Born to the purple,” they'd say, or in Catholic ecclesiastic circles, attaining the rank of Cardinal was “promotion to purple.”
Scarce purple dye came into use some 6,000 years ago by the Phoenicians in the port city of Tyre. Some ancients discovered that a small sea snail called murex or purpora (Ah–ha! That's where the name comes from) secreted a purple ink from a cyst near its head. This ink permanently dyed fabrics that were left to oxidize in the dazzling Mediterranean sun.
Even in these earliest
days of recorded history, squeezing zits from the heads of whelks
was extremely labor intensive. It drove up the cost and drove
down the supply of such rare dyes. Purple garments were so coveted
that, according to the Old Testament (Exodus XXV), the Lord asked
Moses on Mt. Sinai to bring him offerings from his people of
“blue, purple and scarlet threads, fine linen and goat's
hair." Later, St. Luke, in the New Testament (Luke XVI)
described a local fat cat as being “clothed in purple and
fine linen.” Apparently the Lord knew what he was talking
about when he demanded that the Children of Israel sacrifice
their purple threads.
Colors approaching Tyrean Purple did not become accessible to
the masses until after the middle of the 19th century. In 1859,
a Brit named W.H. Perkins was muddling around in his chemistry
lab when he accidentally concocted a gooey, tar-like substance
which, when diluted with alcohol, became a permanent purple dyestuff.
He called this mess “mauve.” So you have him to thank
for a rediscovered euphemism and starting the first commercial
manufacturing of synthetic, coal–tar dyestuff. Today's textile
producers and fashion designers have taken Perkins' lead. They
are more prone to turn to the world of flora to describe purple
tones: aubergine (no woman would be caught dead wearing it if
we used the English “eggplant”), grape, mauve, iris,
lilac, orchid, violet and thistle.
Calling purple by its God–given name has now become almost solely the province of children. Crayola still has a purple crayon and nerdy Barney is purple. Even the exploitive market experts, who are pushing nail polish for little girls, realize that “purple haze" is more understandable to them than its grown–up counterparts. The recognizably purple nail colorings that fill whole aisles of the ubiquitous Rite-Aid stores (where I did some of my best research) bore such aliases as Raisin, Sparkling Wine, Amethyst Smoke, Merlot, Sangria and––excuse their fractured français––“au currant.”
Purple–toned lipsticks fared no better in this marketing purge. Their names looked like an inventory list from the Wine Warehouse: Blackberry Brandy, Cabernet, Chianti, Bordeaux; or, like a bordello's libidinous glossary: Sherry Seduction, Heartbreak, Lust, Midnight Rendezvous, Exotica and Vamp.
Does this desecration of
an ancient and noble color presage a time when purple will be
found only in passages rather than in aisles? Perhaps it's time
to take far more seriously Alice Walker's proscription from her
book, “The Color Purple:”
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©2003 by Sid Frigand.
The illustrations are from IMSI's
Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael,
CA, 94901-5506, USA.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Sid Frigand. To send an
email, click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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