However, RYB is a poor match for human vision. The better subtractive primaries are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Mixing red and blue produces a dull, desaturated purple even when you're starting with saturated primaries, and the three main natural dyes are not particularly saturated. Tyrian purple was esteemed because it produced a visibly better purple than mixing woad and madder, which makes a purplish brown. Likewise, crimson from Kermes insects produces a visibly better red than madder:
Poor people would still have colored clothing, because all clothing was expensive hand-made clothing back then, so the marginal cost of dying with the common plant dyes was relatively small. But rich people could afford expensive dyes, and afford multiple applications of the cheap dyes. In some cases there were also sumptuary laws restricting use of expensive dyes. Rich people's clothing would have looked far more garish by our standards.
> Poor people would still have colored clothing, because all clothing was expensive hand-made clothing back then, so the marginal cost of dying with the common plant dyes was relatively small.
To summarize from what I can remember: it wasn’t even quite that clothing was “expensive”. You didn’t buy clothing unless you were absurdly rich. You didn’t even buy cloth. You bought raw fabric, usually wool or linen, and you had to spin it into yarn or thread and then weave it into cloth. Spinning was the vast majority of the actual work you’d do though. And by “you” I meant if you were a woman, because this was always considered women’s work. And highly respected as such, to the point where even wealthy high status women took pride in still doing it or at least claiming to, or at least other people claimed it of women they admired.
Besides visual attractiveness when fresh, the value of the dyes also depended a lot on their lightfastness and water resistance.
Many of the dyes used in antiquity degraded quickly, so the clothes had to be dyed again periodically.
Tyrian purple was valued not only because it was hard to obtain, but also because the clothes dyed with it kept their color for a very long time. The next most resistant dye was the blue from indigo or woad, then the red from beetles. The other colors faded quickly.
You could get legal cover for divorce if married to a worker in the production of purple, from the rotting murex, given the awful smell it gave... (Production is in general "costly", but not always with similar legal sides.)
Remember that artistic pygments (so, for goods that also involved «status symbol») had traditionally been quite toxic - using arsenic, lead... That was the available technology, and it involved drawbacks and compromises.
Edit: sorry, not just artistic: people poisoned themselves just to wear makeup. "Met Gala"s involved a drastic amount of sacrifice.
The proper Vantablack coatings are ITAR restricted materials that require an export license, so the comparison is really quite meaningful. You wouldn't be killed for using it without the King's permission, but you could serve time at His Majesty's pleasure for it.
we should bring back sumptuary laws, can make it legal by prohibiting the sale of some materials to nonaccredited investors with the consequences of unlimited tax to the business
circumvents freedom of expression by giving no consequences to the individual if they someone procure the material themselves
but leverages the unlimited right to regulate commerce and unlimited right to tax
As the article mentions, you had to crush alot of snails to get that dye.
The story goes that Roman senators would wear a purple stripe across their toga as a symbol of their status. Julius Caesar, not to be outdone, started wearing an all-purple toga. Which then became the mark of the emperor.
