Scheele’s Green, Research of chosen colour

 For my colour story project I really wanted to go with a shade of green, because green has always stood out to me and I feel its one of the less obvious choices since we see it in such abundance in nature. 

After doing research on colours and their origins, with a special interest in types of green, I remembered the infamous.  Scheele’s Green.

Scheele's green is the name for the shade of green that was created using arsenic, responsible for the deaths of many people. 

'' Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, produced a toxic material (in bright green hue) with the use of the noxious chemical, arsenite, which was called Scheele’s Green.

People used this material for things like dying paper, fabric, toys, etc. But then, some came to the conclusion that this particular dye was the reason for many deaths. For example, the death of French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821, as his bedroom wallpaper featured the deadly hue.''

People would use this shade of green in wallpaper in their homes and suddenly succumb to mysterious deaths. This green was expensive and seen as very luxury and so this was one of the few tragedies that affected largely rich upper class people. 

More on the history of green in general:

 

''The green color was famous as a poisonous color. And it was also a hard color to come by. In ancient times, the color green was expensive to produce. Therefore, a few people were able to get their hands on green pigments.
But one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s green being the color of nature. Since the dawn of time, green has been a natural color and represents life.
In some regions like ancient Egypt, people associated color with regeneration and rebirth. They used this color to paint their tomb walls. 
Also, ancient Romans used this color for mosaics, frescos, and stained glass.''

''Back in the time (renaissance), the color of clothing could reveal a person’s social class. It was a kind of indicator. Green was the color of professions such as merchants, bankers, and the gentry. Since it was gaining more popularity, people started to produce more green pigments from plants or materials. But one gloomy point was that the color used to fade away over time.
To prevent that, the ancient Romans found a solution to drench copper plates in wine to create verdigris, a green pigment that comes after weathering the metal.''

Verdigris is actually the cause of the statue of liberty's green hue. 

More on Scheele's green:

''In the 19th century, the toxicity of arsenic compounds was not readily known. Nineteenth-century journals contained reports of children wasting away in bright green rooms, of ladies in green dresses swooning, and of newspaper printers being overcome by arsenic vapors. There is one example of acute poisoning of children attending a Christmas party where dyed candles were burned''