thread of evil and horrible paint pigments from history because i like cursing people with information

scheele’s green, a potently toxic mixture of arsenic and copper that despite its extreme toxicity was used as food coloring just because it looked pretty. also used for wallpaper colorant, and was notorious for creating gases that’d kill the wallpapered house’s inhabitants

paris green, intended to be a replacement for scheele’s green. it was immediately known by its discoverers to be just as toxic as its predecessor but that did not deter people from using it anyway for the aesthetic. people apparently loved to burn candles dyed with this shit

Thread broke for some reason, so lemme throw this here https://twitter.com/L0ST_VEGAS/status/1324871036832112640

And this one too https://twitter.com/l0st_vegas/status/1324873159841992704

Dr. Frank Cyr brought the color of School Buses to us in the 1930’s, intended to be visible, and make an impression. Unfortunately however, the impression its OG formula of hexavalent chromium left was ripping apart your DNA to get to your sweet, sweet electrons. Mm, lung damage.

Around the 1910’s-20’s, there was a huge boom with radium being peddled as a luminous miracle pigment and health cure, finding its way into paints, tonics, and more. Like the paints that gave factory workers jaw damage from putting paintbrushes exposed to it in their mouths.

With its use surprisingly dating back to the birth of christ, Uranium “Yellowcake” Yellow found its way into use marking military vehicles, leading to the same poisonings radium did that caused some sufferers to be buried in lead lined coffins. Modern versions are less dangerous

Hey horrible little fact about Victorian people, did you know they were like, fucking obsessed with mummies? mummy unwrapping parties, snorting lines of mummy, mummy dust as paint pigment— like the kind used for a color called caput mortum / “dead man’s head”

Please keep in mind that harvesting this pigment was an evil act of colonialism and honestly disrespectful to the dead, I include it for the sake of the entire existence of the practice being an interesting chunk of Victorian history but I’m absolutely not endorsing its existence