The Origin of Purple

Purple is a paradox, a contradiction of a color. Associated since antiquity with regality, luxuriance, and the loftiness of intellectual and spiritual ideals, purple was, for many millennia, chiefly distilled from a dehydrated mucous gland of mollusks that lies just behind the rectum: the bottom of the bottom-feeders. That insalubrious process, undertaken since at least the 16th Century BC (and perhaps first in Phoenicia, a name that means, literally, ‘purple land’), was notoriously malodorous and required an impervious sniffer and a strong stomach. Though purple may have symbolized a higher order, it reeked of a lower ordure.

From “Tyrian Purple: The disgusting origins of the color purple” by Kelly Grovier for the BBC

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