Purple is a unique color that many people are drawn to. It’s a color of mystery, royalty, and imagination. Although it may not appear in as many daily items as blue, green, and red, purple captivates us all with its distinctive and enchanting features.
Here are some of the most fascinating facts about the color purple. Some of them sound too shocking to be real!
1. The First Purple Came From Snails
Tyrian purple, discovered in the 16th century BCE, was the first known discovery of purple in the world. Even though purple appears in nature, it’s a rare color among plants and animals, so people likely never saw it or didn’t have a name for it before Tyrian purple came to be. Tyrian purple was a dye made from the mucus of the spiny dye-murex sea snail.
According to mythology, Hercules’ dog discovered Tyrian purple before any humans did. Legends say that the dog picked up one of the snails and developed purple drool after carrying it around. In real life, the pigment was most commonly used for textiles.
2. Purple Used to Be Very Expensive to Make
Even though people learned that purple dye could come from certain snails, the color was difficult to obtain for a long time. They needed to collect a lot of snail mucus to create only a tiny amount of purple dye. In many cases, it would take thousands of snails to produce only one ounce of Tyrian purple dye. The process of getting dye from the snails was also tedious and smelly.
A pound of purple dye cost about half of a soldier’s salary at the time, which is comparable to buying a diamond ring today. Due to the complicated process, royalty were usually the only ones who could afford this rare and expensive color.
3. Only Two National Flags Have Purple on Them
Of all the current national flags in the world, only two use the color purple. Even those two flags have barely any purple on them. Dominica has a purple and green bird (the Imperial Amazon) in the center of the flag. Then, Nicaragua has a tiny rainbow in the center of the flag, which includes purple in the rainbow. Other flags include indigo or pink, but no other ones currently have purple.
Some historical flags and subdivision flags include bits of purple, and several of the subdivision flags have purple as one of the main colors. The reason why purple is so rare in flags is that when many of the designs were created, purple was still rare and expensive, which is why most locations didn’t consider it.
4. Carrots Used to Be Purple
Carrots are bright orange vegetables, but it wasn’t always that way. Thousands of years ago in ancient Persia, most carrots were naturally purple. They were known for their sweet, earthy flavor in food, but they were also used as a medicinal herb. By the 6th century, there were three types of carrots: purple, yellow, and white.
It wasn’t until the 16th century that orange carrots appeared. The Dutch started crossing mutant strains of the existing carrot colors to create higher-quality carrots. It took them several generations to get the orange carrots commonly seen today. Orange carrots became the most popular because they are more pest-resistant, and most people believe they taste the best. While purple carrots still exist, these are less common than the orange ones.
5. Purple Eyes Are Possible but Extremely Rare
While you can make your eyes look purple using colored contacts, a few people in the world (less than 1%) naturally have eyes that appear violet or purple. This unique eye appearance can occur if someone has albinism, which is estimated to be approximately 1 in 20,000 people worldwide. People with albinism have a significantly reduced amount of melanin in their bodies, causing a lack of pigmentation from head to toe. Their eyes don’t look purple because of pigmentation but rather because of the way light interacts with their irises and is reflected back out.
There’s a common misconception that albino individuals always have red eyes. Most people with albinism actually have blue eyes, but some even have hazel or light brown eyes. Very few who have albinism have red and violet eyes. Even if they do, their unique eye color may only be obvious in certain lighting. So, it’s possible for someone’s eyes to look purple, but it’s so rare that you may never see someone with that eye color in your lifetime.
6. Purple Foods Are Considered Healthy
There aren’t many naturally purple foods, so you may associate purple foods with artificial items like candy. Yet, if a food has a natural purple hue, it’s usually considered healthy. Grapes, eggplant, purple carrots, and certain berries are a few examples of foods that look purple.
Most purple foods get that coloring from compounds known as anthocyanins. Anthocyanins have antioxidant effects that help protect the body. So, if you eat purple food regularly, you may experience positive side effects over time, although further research still needs to be done in this area.
7. There’s a “Purple Day”
March 26th is “Purple Day.” However, it’s not a day to celebrate the color purple. The day is dedicated to spreading epilepsy awareness since purple often represents that. Lavender is the international flower of epilepsy, so people have used that flower’s hue to spread epilepsy awareness, too.
Purple Day started in 2008 when Cassidy Megan, a young woman with epilepsy, wanted to help more people learn about the condition. During Purple Day, people are encouraged to wear purple, spread the word about epilepsy, and donate to epilepsy foundations. It’s great to see purple being used for a good cause.
8. Purple Is the Rarest Car Color
Neutral colors like white, black, gray, and silver are the most popular car colors. Yet, purple is one of the car colors we rarely see. It has decreased in popularity throughout the years, and now, only 0.1% of cars are purple. It’s the least common car color tied with gold, which also makes up 0.1% of all cars. Yellow is a close second, making up 0.2% of all vehicles.
It’s unclear why purple cars are so unpopular. Purple is a beautiful color, but most cars don’t come in purple because it’s not in high demand. Anyone who’s interested in a purple car will usually need to custom order it or have it repainted. Dark purple cars are much more common than light or bright purple.
9. Technically, Purple Doesn’t Exist
When it comes to the visible spectrum of light, purple doesn’t exist. The spectrum goes from the longest wavelength (red) to the shortest wavelength (violet). While most people consider violet a type of purple, violet has more blue, while purple has more red. Physicists explain that purple doesn’t have its own specific wavelength. Instead, it’s a mixture of wavelengths that our brain perceives. This makes it a “non-spectral color.”
Our brains create purple by mixing blue, red, and/or violet wavelengths (the longest and shortest wavelengths). So, in short, purple does exist in our brains, but no single wavelength represents it. Seeing purple is a more complicated process than most people realize.
10. It Was Once Illegal for Non-Royalty to Wear Purple
Purple can signify royalty, and there were time periods when people took that very seriously. Since purple used to be a rare and expensive color, some places even made it illegal for anyone who wasn’t royal to wear the hue. Queen Elizabeth I is an example of that. She forbade anyone outside of her close family to wear purple clothes. Roman emperors enforced similar rules, and offenders could be punished by death.
With laws dictating clothing colors, wearing purple not only indicated wealth but also status. However, as purple became more accessible, the rules loosened. Once purple was accessible to lower-class citizens, it wasn’t as special, causing royalty to have less desire to regulate it.
11. There Are Words That Rhyme With Purple
Some color names have lots of rhymes (such as red and green), but purple is one that often stumps people. Most people assume that purple has no rhyming words, but that’s just because there aren’t any common words. Curple and hirple are two words in the Merriam-Webster dictionary that rhyme with purple. Curple is another word for rump, typically referring to a horse. Hirple is another word for hobble or limp.
In the Urban Dictionary, turple rhymes with purple. Turple can describe someone acting annoying, aggressive, and/or cocky. While none of these words are common (they may not even exist in your spellcheck), they’re all unique words that you can use when creating a rhyming poem about purple.
12. Purple Was the First Synthetic Dye Color
Purple may have been a rare color for many years, but it ended up being the first color for synthetic dye. Natural sources were used to make dyes for centuries before 18-year-old chemist William Henry Perkin invented a synthetic alternative in 1856. Perkin experimented with various products to end up inventing mauveine, a purple synthetic dye.
Other chemists had messed with synthetic dyes before Perkin, but mauveine was the first to be sold to the public. Mauveine quickly became a huge success because it was an easy way to make purple dye, making it much more affordable than the snail-based dye that existed before it. Similar synthetic dyes like fuchsia and crimson came after, and more colors continued to come out each year.
