• Pigment, a form of nature, is an insoluble substance that gives color to paint and other materials. The melanin in hair, skin, and eyes is a pigment, so is the chlorophyll in plants. Ochre—found decorating 350,000-year-old paleolithic bones—is the oldest colored pigment used by humans.
• By the late nineteenth century, Michigan Carbon Works was the largest industry in Detroit. “As buffalo bones on the prairie became scarce, scavengers began to raid Indian Burial Grounds for bones,” their website says.
• In the 1960s, the Ebonex Corporation bought the bone black division of Michigan Carbon Works.
• Today, most commercial white sugar is purified using bone char, and you can still buy bone black pigment for your art projects
• “The deeper the blue becomes,” said Wassily Kandinsky, “the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural.”
• “Azure” is a misspelling of the medieval Latin word for lapis lazuli. To make ultramarine, grind lapis lazuli into a fine powder; mix it with melted wax, oils, and resin; then knead in a lye solution.
• Artists loved to paint the Virgin Mary’s robes ultramarine, and Vermeer tinted the head covering of his Girl with a Pearl Earring with the blue, miring his family in debt. Michelangelo couldn’t afford the pigment.
• According to the ancient Phoenicians, a dog chewed a mollusk along the coast of Tyre, a city in Lebanon, its tongue turned bright purple, and its human owners noticed. Also called Phoenician red, Phoenician purple, imperial purple, and royal purple, Tyrian purple was the most rare and expensive pigment in human history and is at least four thousand years old. Amazingly, weathering and sunlight makes this purple brighter.
• The few remaining snail dyers—only nineteen Mixtec people legally permitted to do so as of 2011—harvest once every moon cycle between October and March. They scamper along the Oaxacan coast carrying skeins of cotton, and when they find a tixinda, they activate its mucus, a narcotic meant for paralyzing prey, by making the endangered snail afraid. The precious few yellow drops drip onto the skein, oxidizing into green, then violet, then a brilliant purple.
• Leonardo da Vinci is said to have preferred meditating in a lavender-colored glow.
• Queen Elizabeth I permitted only the inner circle of the royal family to wear purple. She was also rumored to have whitened her skin and hidden her smallpox scars with white makeup made from vinegar mixed with Venetian ceruse. The main ingredient in Venetian ceruse is poisonous lead.
• “Nature absolutely paints like the harlot,” wrote Herman Melville in Moby Dick’s famous chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.” “In many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own;” Melville wrote, “various nations have in some way recognized a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; … this pre-eminence … applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.”
• In 1978, the United States banned the production of lead white paint, which had dominated the white paint market through the beginning of that century.
• Aristotle believed God sent colors through celestial rays, that all colors came from black and white and related to the four primal elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
• In Chinese philosophy, basic colors—black, red, white, yellow, and qing, which is a combination of blue and green—also corresponded to the five elements: water, fire, metal, earth, and wood.
• Newton documented that light was made of seven visible colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
• Wolfgang von Goethe, author of Faust, asserted in his book, Theory of Colors, that colors could not just be measured scientifically, but subjectively, through the emotions: “Colors are light’s suffering and joy.”
• Some call PANTONE 448 C the “ugliest color in the world.” A few find it elegant.
• To make cinnabar pixels on a computer screen, also called #E34234, mix 89% red, 25.9% green, and 20.4% blue.
• Nocheztli blood is a redder red because their bodily juices are rich in carminic acid; if you squeeze one until it bursts, its crimson liquid will stain your hands. “Magenta—Aztec,” Frida Kahlo scribbled in her notebook, “old blood of prickly pear, the most alive and ancient.”
• Seventy thousand female nocheztli make one pound of cochineal; harvesting the insects is tedious.
• In 1578, the Spanish shipped seventy-two tons of cochineal, more profitable than gold, from Peru to Spain, which equals about ten billion female nocheztli. Pirates attacked Spanish ships for this red, and the Spanish introduced cochineal production to the Canary Islands, which became a major exporter of the pigment. At the same time and on the same waters, the transatlantic slave trade was well underway, which kidnapped nearly thirteen million people between 1501 and 1867.
• artists-for-hire are available to mix a loved one’s cremated remains—“cremains”—with oil paint and apply the pigment to a canvas.
• In a 2015 online survey of 10,868 adults across ten countries and four continents, blue was overwhelmingly people’s favorite color.
• Prussian blue replaced the ultramarine made from lapis lazuli. This more affordable blue colored The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai and saturated Pablo Picasso’s blue period.
• Reckitt’s blue and used in laundry to offset yellowing and make whites pop. The British brought the blue to their colonial outposts, like Curaçao in the Caribbean, and imposed their ideas of cleanliness.
• Until the late-1800s, verdigris was the most vibrant green pigment available to artists. The name is Old French for “green of Greece.”
• Ochre can sometimes be yellow, but it is not bright. In fifteenth-century India, people began feeding cows mango leaves and collected their urine from special sand. The dried urine was then ground to make a pigment called purree. Van Gogh used this luminous yellow for his swirling celestial bodies in Starry Night. A diet of mango leaves makes cows unhealthy, so by the early twentieth century, the practice of making purree was supposedly banned.
• The English painter J. M. W. Turner, known for turbulent and violent marine paintings, used purree so much his critics said his paintings were “afflicted with jaundice.” Turner switched to a synthetic lead-based yellow known to cause delirium. Nicknamed “the painter of light,” Turner also had a passion for black. “If I could find anything blacker than black, I’d use it,” he said.
• Science teaches us that we see white when light hits an object that scatters all the colored wavelengths; we see black when an object absorbs all light, all wavelengths. Just like in the paintings of Font-de-Gaume, black holds all the colors.
• In 2016, after experimenting with the Vantablack, the British artist Anish Kapoor, known for Cloud Gate, the giant bean-shaped mirror in Chicago’s Millennium Park, negotiated with Surrey NanoSystems for exclusive rights to use Vantablack as an art material.
• In a 2021 interview during his Oxford-based art show, which featured red and gory sculptures of disemboweling, decapitation, bloodletting, and the vagina of a ten-thousand-breasted woman, Kapoor mentions that the first cultural act of solidarity may have been ancient women whose cycles synced up and who covered their bodies in red ochre to hide their menstrual blood. When he experienced a nervous breakdown as a young man, his mother flew to India to retrieve some earth from the place he grew up. Kapoor placed it in the darkness under his bed. After that, he dreamed himself well. “Colour is deeply illusionistic,” Kapoor said. “Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment,” said Claude Monet.

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• Coffee grounds are best at improving soil.
• When using grounds in the compost bin or pile, layer 3-parts leaves to 1-part fresh grass clippings to 1-part coffee grounds by volume.
• Brewer said. Research shows that using a 1% to 2% solution mixed with water as a soil drench caused 100% of slugs to leave the treated soil and subsequently die of caffeine poisoning.
• To make a 1% to 2% soil drench add 1-part water to 2-parts strong brewed coffee. For example, use 1 cup water to 2 cups of coffee. To reduce slug feeding on foliage, add 9-parts water to 1-part brewed coffee and apply as a spray.

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