the.com/indigo blue
the color between us and ultraviolet, smuggled into rainbows by a man who really liked the number seven
means A deep blue-purple color, like the dark dye traditionally made from the indigo plant, sitting between blue and violet on the spectrum.
from The word traveled a long road: from Greek 'indikon,' meaning 'Indian dye,' through Latin 'indicum' and Portuguese 'indigo,' all pointing back to India, where the plant Indigofera was a major source of the dye. The 'man who liked seven' nod in the essence is Isaac Newton, who chose to name seven colors in the rainbow — slotting indigo between blue and violet, supposedly to echo the seven notes of a musical scale. Many argue indigo is hard to distinguish at all, but it earned its spot because Newton wanted the count to come out to a satisfying seven.
- newton's choice
- Added to the spectrum to match seven musical notes
- slave crop
- Indigo dye fueled colonial plantation economies for centuries
- hard to see
- Most humans struggle to distinguish it from blue
- denim origin
- Indigo dyed the first blue jeans worldwide
- oldest dye
- Used over six thousand years ago in Peru
synthetic indigo created 1878 — adolf von baeyer's laboratory synthesis in germany revolutionized textile industry and replaced plant dyes