Crimson

Crimson is a strong, slightly blue-shifted red, and its name and history are bound up with a dye made from insects. The word descends through Old Spanish and Arabic from the Sanskrit for the kermes insect, whose dried bodies yielded a rich red used across the ancient Mediterranean; later the New World cochineal insect gave an even stronger crimson that became one of the most valuable exports of colonial Spanish America.

Because a fast, deep red was costly, crimson carried associations of wealth, rank and ceremony, used for robes of state and of high office. It shares the general symbolism of red, blood, life, passion, sacrifice, intensified toward the sombre and the regal by its depth. In Christian usage rich reds mark martyrdom and the blood of Christ. As a distinct shade crimson signals a red that is serious rather than bright, ceremonial rather than alarming, and its very name is a reminder of how much colour history is really the history of the substances that produced it.

Crimson is the colour of two insects, and its history is the history of what people would pay for them.

Kermes comes from Kermes vermilio, a scale insect living on the kermes oak around the Mediterranean. The dried bodies of the females yield a deep red dye, the word crimson descends from the Arabic qirmiz by way of Old Spanish, and the same root gives carmine. Kermes was the prestige red of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, and the quantity of insects needed for a bolt of cloth put it far beyond ordinary use.

Cochineal comes from Dactylopius coccus, a scale insect farmed on prickly pear cactus in Mesoamerica, and it is far stronger: it yields perhaps ten times the dye of kermes for the same weight. The Spanish encountered organised cochineal production in Mexico, took control of it, and made the dried insects one of the most valuable exports of the American empire after silver. The crown kept the biological origin obscure for as long as it could, and European naturalists argued for over a century about whether the commodity was a seed, a berry or an animal.

The consequence is that the reds of European rank, the cardinal's robe and the soldier's coat among them, were paid for by an insect harvest on another continent. When synthetic alizarin and the aniline reds arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cochineal industry collapsed within a generation, and the colour that had signified rank became available to anyone.