3 ms·

French Silk Sample Book (ca. 1900)

• hilbert42 6y ago
  This is a phenomenal range of samples with a dazzling array of patterns, and all the colors are still brilliant (there's no obvious fade that I could notice). Clearly, the sample book has been kept in ideal conditions and it would be interesting to know what they were. Also, it would be interesting to know what types of dyes were used. Many organic and inorganic dyes from that period are brilliant because they often incorporated heavy metals that by today's standards would be classed as toxic and thus unusable nowadays (such dyes are often much more stable than their present day counterparts). These heavy metal dyes often had dazzling colors, for instance Scheele's Green aka copper arsenite. Here, the article isn't very helpful, in fact it's not helpful at all. It would be interesting to pass an X-ray fluorescent (XRF) analyzer over the samples to see if heavy metals were actually present in any of them (from looking at some of the colors I'd reckon so). BTW, the same heavy metal dyes and (sometimes pigments) are often found in books of the period (≈early 1800s to WWI). The frontispieces and plates in good quality books from then when viewed even now still dazzle one—and they they've not faded (noticeably anyway) because they use these brilliant, stable but toxic dyes.