Long before humans could paint the world with pixels, people required precious commodities to produce pigments.

For the most part of human history, we have derived hues and dyes from nature: People cooked plants and sometimes even animal carcasses to procure the desired pigment. They even mined precious minerals from subterranean deposits and ground them to produce hues. The concept of natural pigments is not very strange — several dyes that we use today were procured from the Earth, and even if you try to concoct those hues in the lab, some shades remain rarefied. Check out some colours that are created by humans from our kaleidoscopic world and how they were procured.

Tyrian purple

Roman and Phoenician emperors were very fond of this long-lasting wine-coloured dye that didn't fade easily. But preparing just an ounce of Tyrian purple meant crushing 250,000 Murex sea snails that use a kind of tinted mucus to sedate prey and protect their eggs.

Imperial yellow

Only the Chinese emperor and his high-ranking officials were spiritually entitled to use this significant shade. This colour was procured from the Chinese foxglove that was harvested at the end of the eighth lunar month and pounded to a smooth paste. This paste had to be mixed with a mordant made of ashes from mulberry, beach wormwood, or oak trees.

Perkin’s mauve

William Perkin, the chemist, accidentally invented his eponymous shade of purple while trying to synthesize quinine from coal tar in 1856. The Victorians instantly fell in love with the colour, but it is a demure shade of what we now recognize as "mauve".

Scheele’s green

While Carl Wilhelm Scheele was fretting over his lab-derived copper arsenite tincture might be toxic, it was also stable and bright. Companies began using colour on almost everything from dresses to wallpaper—until people started dying (in some cases).

Ultramarine

For over a thousand years, just a single region in Afghanistan was an abundant and only source of lapis lazuli. This beautiful blue rock was refined to procure a stunning blue hue called ultra­marine. A supposed scarcity and resistance to fading made it as valuable as gold.

Ochre

Ochre is a kind of reddish-brown hue that is created by mixing iron oxide with clay. Cave painters used ochre to make handprints and draw motifs on the walls, probably because the colour did not fade much. It seems like our ancestors used to travel long distances to mine ochre—sometimes up to 25 miles in the Lascaux area—just to use this pigment in their art.

We may combine and blend colours derived from nature, but truly novel pigments do not come along often.