Lauren Deitzer
Purple isn’t just a one-of-a-kind color — it’s actually not a “real” color at all because it doesn’t exist on the visible light spectrum. Remember ROYGBIV, the mnemonic device to help you recall the colors of the rainbow? There’s no “P” in there — just indigo and violet, which aren’t quite the same. Violet is cooler and more blueish, a single wavelength of visible light. And indigo — well, Isaac Newton just added indigo to the rainbow because he felt like it needed seven colors to match the seven musical notes and seven (known) planets.
Purple, however, is just a trick of the brain, a perceptual invention that our minds create when our eyes see blue and red together. Weird, huh? Wedged between soothing blue and stimulating red, TCU’s school color refuses to be one thing — and that’s what makes it so magical.
Football season brings a flood of purple to Fort Worth: purple banners, purple hats, purple mugs, purple lights, purple flags, and purple face paint. Grown men wear bright purple shirts, and purple adornments pop up on front lawns. But for most of human history, purple was exquisitely rare and wildly expensive. The color’s circuitous path from ancient royalty to Amon G. Carter Stadium reveals its unconventional cultural meaning and why it’s such a power player.
TCU’s standout school color, Horned Frog Purple, is a medium-dark shade of blueish magenta (Pantone PMS 268 C if you want to paint your house). The school’s website explains it simply: “Purple represents royalty.” Humans have long associated the color with dominance and majesty — but why? It all started back in the Bronze Age, not with horned frogs, but with carnivorous sea snails. Millions of them.
Purple’s Journey
Lauren Deitzer
The Land of Purple
About 1,700 years ago on the coast of modern Lebanon, some enterprising individuals with a great deal of time on their hands made a promising discovery: The toxic mucous secreted by certain carnivorous sea snails could be turned into purple dye. One of the rarest colors in nature, purple was highly prized. Dye manufacturing centers soon sprang up in the cities of Tyre and Sidon, powering the rise of local economies and civilizations. Word of the purple spread far and wide; many scholars think the names Canaan and Phoenicia came from the Mesopotamian words for land of purple.
It took 300,000 Murex snails to produce just one ounce of dye, enough to color 20 TCU bandannas. The process was long, laborious, and atrociously smelly: First, catch 300,000 of the meat-eating sea snails. Smash their shells, extract their disgusting mucous glands, and then soak the snail snot in saltwater. Let it all rot in the sunshine for several days. Like mucilaginous magic, the snail juice would slowly transform into a vibrant purple color. Depending on the duration of the snot rot, the hue could be anywhere from dark crimson to brilliant violet-blue.
But rich, pure “Tyrian purple” was the crowd favorite, described poetically by Pliny the Elder as the color of “clotted blood.” The dye wasn’t just vivid and lustrous — it was incredibly long-lasting. It didn’t fade in sunshine, wash out in water, or dim with time. Tyrian purple pigments unearthed in archaeological sites today can still be used to dye fabrics (if you can find them amongst the billions of crushed snail shells).
Power to the Purple
Lauren Deitzer
The Greeks called Tyrian dye porphura, which became purpura in Latin, purpul in Old English, and purple to us. Everybody knew about Tyrian purple; it was name-dropped in Homer’s Iliad and the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus. But almost nobody could afford it because it was so ridiculously expensive to make. You had to be filthy rich and famously powerful to drape yourself in purple, on par with Persia’s King Cyrus the Great or Alexander the Great. If you didn’t have “the Great” after your name — put the purple down.
By the Roman era, a pound of Tyrian purple silk cost the same as a top-shelf male lion. It was twice as expensive as gold. Only victorious generals or emperors like Julius Caesar could wear an all-purple toga, the ultimate status symbol. Senators were allowed one wide purple stripe, and priests had to make do with a simple purple hem. Eventually, Roman rulers wanted all the purple for themselves and instituted a state monopoly on its manufacture. For anyone else, wearing purple was now a crime punishable by death.
Byzantine emperors continued the “royals only” rule for purple and were equally obsessed with the color. Their queens gave birth in a room made of purple marble, which in turn gave birth to the phrase “born in the purple” (denoting royal heirs born during their parents’ reign). The production of Tyrian purple continued until 1453 when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire fell, and the secret snail snot recipes were lost — but the connotations of purple as royal, imperial, and powerful remained.
Fun Fact: Only two countries have purple on their flags: Dominica (on a purple parrot) and Nicaragua (in a rainbow).
Mauve Madness
Lauren Deitzer
Fast-forward four centuries to Britain and the Industrial Revolution. Coal combustion fueled the factories, steamships, and railways that were modernizing society, but it also created a slimy black waste product called coal tar. It was sticky, stinky, and most people just dumped it in the rivers to get rid of it. But chemists were fascinated by coal tar’s complex compounds and started doing experiments.
One such chemist was Henry Perkin. In 1856, he was trying to turn coal tar into quinine, a malaria medication much in demand in the expanding British Empire. He failed. But Perkin discovered something else in the bottom of his test tube: mucky dregs that dissolved into a bright, beautiful purple. Adding a few more chemicals transformed it into dye.
Perkin knew he had a gold mine on his hands. A few synthetic purple dyes (made from guano and lichen) had recently popped up here and there, but they were crazy expensive and of mediocre quality. Still, the likes of Queen Victoria and Empress Eugénie of France had recently worn lilac dresses to feverish acclaim. The people were hungry for purple.
Perkin patented the process, moved his laboratory out of his parents’ attic, and borrowed their life savings to build a dye factory (never mind that he had never been inside a dye factory before). He was only 18. To market it to the British middle class, he chose a sophisticated name for his color: mauve, the French word for the purple mallow flower.
For the first time in history, purple was available and affordable. It was a triumph of alchemy and industry — and by 1858, purple was everywhere. Everywhere, from dresses and bonnets to school uniforms and men’s suits. There were purple kitchen appliances, purple stamps, purple books, purple wallpaper, purple ribbons, and purple rugs.
The color went global, and Perkin became a very wealthy man. Other chemists went coal tar-crazy, creating two new hues you’ll recognize from your crayon box: fuchsia and magenta. Traditionalists considered the new colors vulgar and cheap, an epidemic disease blamed on the ever-stylish French. Once the most uncommon color in the world, purple was now impossible to escape — even in art galleries.
Fun Fact: Purple appears in some of the earliest prehistoric cave art (like at Altamira and Lascaux). Ancient humans made purple paint by grinding manganese and hematite into a powder, then mixing it with animal fat or blood.
Violettomania and Monet
Lauren Deitzer
Purple is almost missing entirely from the history of art before the 1800s. Pure purple pigments are rare, and reds and blues were far too expensive to try and mix. And varnished canvases yellowed with age, turning any purples into brown blah. But around the same time Perkin invented mauve dye, a group of painters called the Pre-Raphaelites started putting purple in their pictures. They dabbed it into shadows, clouds, trees, fields, and even sheep.
Then came the Impressionists, who embraced the color with wild abandon. Monet painted purple snow, purple water, and purple haystacks. He saw the color everywhere, from medieval cathedrals to Victorian train stations. He painted purple images of London blanketed in foggy smoke — only too fitting, as the smog was created by the same coal combustion that produces purple dye.
Art critics were not impressed. Were the Impressionists colorblind or simply insane? One reviewer wrote in the Parisian paper Figaro: “Make it clear to M. Pissarro that the trees are not violet … that in no country can we see the things he paints and that no intelligence can adopt such foolishness!” Another explained that “this predilection for violet is simply an expression of the nervous debility of the painter.” The critics called it “violettomania” and predicted the Impressionists’ rapid demise. They were wrong.
In 1896, when Monet was painting purple pictures of the Seine River in Giverny, a small group of students at Add-Ran Christian University in Texas met in committee. They decided that their school colors would forever be purple and white — and that the Horned Frog would be their mascot. Renamed Texas Christian University in 1902, the school is now the purple pride and joy of Fort Worth.
So, as you don that purple shirt or hang a purple flag from your window, remember the snails that didn’t have to die for the dye, the chemists who made that possible, and the painters called crazy for their love of the color.
Fun Fact: An irrational, persistent fear of the color purple is called porphyrophobia.
The Prettiest Purple Places on the Planet
Lauren Deitzer
Forget the Red River, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Yellowstone National Park — these purple vacation destinations feel like fantastic daydreams brought to life.
Pfeiffer Beach, California
Sea lions frolic in the waters off this mile-long beach, a secluded oasis that’s tucked away on the celebrated Big Sur coastline. Waves explode against dramatic headlands, including a towering offshore rock arch, so there’s no swimming allowed. But you won’t mind because you’ll be too busy gaping at the purple sand. The mountains that cradle Pfeiffer Beach contain manganese garnet, and tiny particles of the purple gemstone wash down to create the mysterious hue.
Banwol Island, South Korea
During the pandemic, people dealt with their restlessness in different ways — baking sourdough bread, perhaps, or planting a garden. On Banwol Island, the residents decided to paint everything around them purple: shops, docks, bridges, telephone booths, picnic tables, hundreds of roofs, and even cars. Farmers joined in and started planting beets and purple kohlrabi. The islanders hoped the new look would attract tourists, and it did — it’s so busy that visitors now must pay an entrance fee. But it’s free if you’re wearing purple.
Provence, France
Cherry trees, olive groves, sunflowers, and herbs fill the fields of the Luberon Valley in Southern France — as do rows and rows of lavender, which burst into vivid bloom every summer. Their fine fragrance mingles with scents of thyme and honey, turning every breath into a healing dose of natural aromatherapy. Be sure to visit Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque and the rosy-red hilltop village of Roussillon.
Chefchaouen, Morocco
With winding cobblestone lanes and a 15th century fortress, this mountain village is already evocative, but most travelers come to see its purple buildings, streets, and stairways. Ranging from periwinkle to indigo and leaning toward blue, Chefchaouen’s stunning Old Town was painted purple to symbolize the heavens … or maybe to repel mosquitoes, which supposedly mistake the color for running water. Time to paint your back porch purple?
Bentonite Hills, Utah
Ribbons of lavender, mauve, and rusty-rose swirl through these surreal hills, which look like giant dollops of soft-serve ice cream. Hikers scamper over the slick, trailless terrain, formed from volcanic ash during the time of the dinosaurs. It’s an otherworldly landscape — so much so that it’s the location of the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulation of the Martian homeland.
Kitakyushu, Japan
Every year between April and May, the century-old wisteria trees at Kawachi Fuji Garden blossom with lush, cascading curtains of purple flowers that connect into tunnels you can walk through. The perfumed portals are as long as two football fields and so popular that you’ll need a timed ticket to get in.
Fun Fact: Purple Prose (PUR-pul prohz) – Noun: Overly ornate, extravagant, overwrought writing that struts like a shimmering peacock on the page, lush and melodramatic, sashaying from thought to thought in velvet slippers and silken synonyms — never simply telling a story, but bedazzling it like a poet of pure ecstasy whose sparkling chalice spills out tremulous metaphors, sentences like ceaseless strands of pearls, and the flowery golden perfume of a thousand and one thesauruses.
