There was no word for blue to describe the color until a few centuries ago. Artifacts excavated in caves are lacking in blue. Some scientists believe that the earliest humans were actually colorblind and could only recognize black, white, red, and only later yellow and green. 6000 years ago, lapis was mined in Afghanistan and was highly prized by Egyptians. They used chemistry to combine with other ingredients like calcium and limestone to create saturated blue pigments. An Egyptian word for blue emerged. In China, copper was blended with heavy elements to create shades of blue. It is said that 40% of the Chinese emperors suffered from heavy-element poisoning. ( They couldn’t give it up in-spite of health concerns ? Will I give up blue if there is no sustainable way to make it ? Are we all fashion victims ? ) Trade flourished and knowledge was exchanged but blue remained expensive and a privilege of royalty. ( Years later, the Buddhist monks started wearing orange robes because it was the cheapest pigment on the market for a long time. The color orange symbolized humble austerity in that society. The class economics of color is still prevalent in today’s society. ) Woad, a plant used as early as the stone age, was used to create a blue fabric dye in Europe. It was also not colorfast, and had a far less intense color . It was, then, strictly the poor relation of the royal blues and azures, used only for clothing worn by the common man. Woad was the only source of blue dye in Europe till indigo imports began from India. The oldest known fabric dyed indigo dating to 6,000 years ago was discovered in Peru. India, Japan, and Southeast Asian nations have used indigo as a dye for centuries. Fast forward to today, we humans invented a new blue after 200 years. It’s called YInMn. Of all the blues, I find Indigo the most charming and attractive.
Image Credit : Catherine Legrand.
After amassing a closet full of blues, I realized that the blue that I wear ain’t a real blue at all. Navy is great but its too classic in some sense. ( Did Sir Isaac Newton feel something similar about the color ? Why did he single out Indigo from the rest of the blues when he looked at the spectrum of light through a prism and labeled it ‘VIBGYOR’ ? ) If navy is Edgar, Indio is Heathcliff. Wild. Natural. Dynamic. Bold. Brash. What ever be the color of it’s youth, indigo ages to become more beautiful. Infact, you look forward to washing it so that you may be a part of its evolution. As indigo-dyed fabrics fade you might find ocean blues or greens, storm-grays and delicate purples. The Japanese worker wear inspired garments and the French chore coats seem to cover the entire range of the color. The images of indigo from all over the world fill me with wanderlust. The humans who wear their old indigo clothes make me feel like I have no style at all. They make me feel like they know this secret that I don’t. These images fill me with a sense of FOMO. There is some hidden profound wisdom that I am missing. There is a certain beauty of aging that my blue clothes are missing. This one molecule seems to induce a lot of envy in me. This is a new and growing feeling. I don’t want to abandon ship, sell all my old navy clothes and jump on to a new indigo bandwagon. But I want to wear more indigo. My first indigo garment was home dyed. I had a pair of pajamas that had collected food stains and an indigo over dye was a sustainable solution to “fix” them. That was the start.
” Indigo pigment is produced within the leaves of a broad range of plants across an array of genera. These plants each contain only a small percentage by weight of actual dyestuff in their leaves. It can take tons of plant material to make a few pounds of dyestuff. One way or another, the pigment is extracted from the leaves and can be purchased in a concentrated, powdered, ball or brick form. This indigo concentrate is often graded on its Indigotin content level, the percentage by weight of actual pigment. Indigotin levels of quality dye concentrate almost always range between 20% and 50%.
The indigo pigment molecule is non-reactive in water. It cannot be dissolved (like salt for example), but it can and must be put into liquid suspension as a first step to making an Indigo vat. The easiest type of Indigo to work with, as well as the most common in the marketplace, is concentrated pigment in finely ground powder form from the plant Indigofera Tinctoria. All processes that I’m describing here presume that is the dye product you’re working with. There are a wealth of other indigos out there, both natural and synthetic, most all of which you can treat similarly to this and get good results.
The indigo pigment molecule, as purchased, will not react with cloth or dye it. It can be rubbed in and will cause a temporary stain, but it is not dye. For the indigo to actually transfer and adhere with the cloth, we must create what is called a Vat. The Vat will be referred to with a capital V here, for at the scale of the individual dyer, the entity known as the Vat has an incredible amount of history and personage, requires pampering and sustenance, often warmth and food. The Vat serves to modify the Indigo molecule in such a way that it eschews inertness and chemically interacts with AKA dyes cloth (and other things, but for our purpose, cloth). The Vat must fulfill two conditions to properly modify the Indigo, it must first have an elevated pH, a condition know as alkalinity in which the amount of OH− ions exceeds that of H+ ions in the solution. Second, the Vat must be a reduced solution, meaning (in this case specifically) that the solution is devoid of dissolved oxygen and there are an excess of electrons in solution which causes the oxygen atoms present on the indigo molecule to be reduced (essentially snatching up these electrons into their orbit) and changing the Indigo molecule into what is called Leuco-Indigo which becomes dissolved in the Vat solution. This change is easily visually confirmed! Leuco-Indigo will appear as a transparent yellow-green as compared to the opaque dark blue of Indigotin in suspension.
Once we have a properly reduced, leuco-indigo rich Vat, we can dip our cloth to dye with indigo. At the moment that the cloth emerges from the Vat it will be colored a tinge of green with the reduced leuco-indigo. As the piece comes into contact with the atmosphere, the pigment molecule, now adhered to the fabric, will lose its excess electrons and visibly transition back to blue.”
The alchemy in this process is dependent upon time, light, water, temperature, humidity and dexterity of hand. Something about knowing that you have full control over the color makes me invincible. Something about knowing that you can mess up the process and end up with an interesting surprise of a color makes it exciting. What other process encourages you to make mistakes ? Something about applying chemistry and doing experiments for pleasure in your backyard makes me feel like a school girl again. Having a hand in the making of the garment makes it extra special. I want to wear it as many times as possible so that I wear all the shades that it will grow into. Indigo is a live color. Every time I wear my indigo garment, it’s a different shade. Take that consumerism !! IN YOUR FACE !! I don’t need to keep consuming to experiment with ‘variety’. But the biggest lesson I have learnt is to accept aging. For a little while, I was obsessed with finding that perfect indigo shade. I found it in the closet of a girl friend of mine. To hold on to that shade, you would never be able to wash it and experience the evolution of its color. To hold on to that shade, would be a slice of time frozen and never let to thaw to come alive. Indigo teaches you to let it be and accept aging. This is the power of the color.
Indigo’s Environmental Impact
” Indigo needs a mordant to bind with the cloth’s treads. Some mordants are acidic, but clothing companies most commonly use mordants made from metals like chromium or aluminum. Alum is slightly safer than chrome, but both kill off plants exposed to factory waste water, destroy ecosystems, poison drinking water, and generally are awful. They are, though, why your jeans fade so perfectly while your t-shirts just eventually all equalize to the same shade of puce or mauve or some other tone reached after five-plus years of the sweat-sun-wash cycle.Aside from the dreaded mordants, natural indigo dye isn’t great for the planet either. It’s extra slow to decompose, it darkens river water so flora and fauna are starved of sunlight and oxygen, and, due to our love for artfully pre-faded jeans, an excessive amount of it is sent out into the world from factories. “
Reading this article felt like a slap in my face. I thought I had discovered some sort of miracle broth dye that is better than everything used by fast fashion brands. What I now have on my hands is an acidic byproduct that I have no place to dispose without polluting the water ways. I haven’t dyed anything since and the yearning is growing. I had accepted some hand me downs in white with an intention of dying them blue. They now sit and rot in the back of my closet till I can find a zero waste way to do this. This story unfortunately pauses here for the time being.