Green boasts more shades than any other color in the spectrum and spans a gulf of association from positive such as life, growth and rebirth to negative such as possessiveness, materialism and envy.
While green is all around us in many parts of the world, plants that yield a fade-resistant green dye are very rare. Traditionally dyers dyed their textiles yellow and then overdyed it with woad or indigo to get a green. The number of steps in this process meant they rarely got the same green each time.
Crushed malachite was used to impart a green hue to paint but if it was crushed too finely, it turned to an unappealing gray.
A mud that France imported from China called Lo Kao was a huge improvement in green dyeing because one only had to boil the mud, add the cloth and then wash the cloth off for a fade-resistant green. The process of creating the mud though was tedious and time consuming. One had to boil two varieties of buckthorn bark for days, add the cloth, wait several more days, remove it and allow it to dry in the sunshine. Where the sun touched it, it turned green. The cloth was again boiled to get the green pigment out of the cloth and into the water which was then dried and exported at great cost to the buyer.
Coal tar dyes were a great step forward in green dyeing efforts and allowed the creation of a variety of new hues.
Natural sources of green dye baths are artichoke, foxglove, larkspur, lilac, nettle, plantago, snapdragon, sorrel, spinach and tarragon.
Universal Meanings of Green
- nature
- safety
- ecology and the environment
Green in Different Cultures
- China: infidelity, a green hat symbolizes that a man’s wife is cheating on him
- Iran: sacred, symbolizes paradise
- Ireland: lucky
- Israel: may symbolize bad news
- Japan: eternal life, the words for blue and green (“ao”) are the same
- Portugal: hope
Trivia
- Traffic lights are green all over the world.
- The solid green flag of Libya is currently the only national flag of a single color.
- NASCAR racers have shared a bias against the color green for decades. Reportedly, it began after a 1920 accident in Beverly Hills, California, that killed defending Indianapolis 500 champion Gaston Chevrolet. It was the first known racing accident in the United States to kill two drivers, and Chevrolet reportedly was driving a green car. But the fear of green cars is fading, primarily because sponsors are willing to pay $15 million to splash their colors on a race car.
- There is a superstition that sewing with green thread on the eve of a fashion show brings bad luck to the design house.
- Green is the color used for night-vision goggles because the human eye is most sensitive to and able to discern the most shades of that color.
Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay
http://www.colormatters.com
http://arts-humanities.squidoo.com/allaboutgreen
http://laundry.about.com
wikipedia.org