THE HISTORY OF GREEN
And what it can do for your home
ERMIT the Frog once sang It ain’t easy being green, and looking at the colour’s turbulent history, he may have had a point. The mercurial hue boasts almost as many connotations as it does shades. The colour of life and seasonal renewal, it alludes to regeneration, fertility, health and hope, yet in the same breath is associated with illness, death, envy, inexperience and the devil.
It was perhaps portentous that in the 15th century the devil was depicted as green, because just 300 years later, in a dark and unpredictable turn, the colour was literally killing people.
A difficult pigment to produce, green was typically made from vegetable matter, but this was hard to fix and faded easily, thereby rendering it rare in artistic and commercial purposes. When chemical varieties were introduced in the late 1700s, their popularity boomed among painters, textile producers, wallpaper designers, confectioners and dyers. Unfortunately, it was discovered too late that several of these tints were lethal.
Perhaps the most notorious, Scheele’s Green, was a lush emerald shade that became an instant favourite, to the point that Victorian Britain was said to be “bathed” in it. The problem, it turned out, was that it was bathed in arsenic. During the early 1800s, numerous poisonings and deaths were linked to green, arsenicladen ball gowns and confectionery, but the more pervasive killer was arguably wallpaper.
The décor trend was increasingly popular in the Victorian era, and after countless cases of violent illness and death, it was discovered that the ubiquitous green wallpapers emitted a toxic vapour which could lead to arsenic poisoning. Ironically, several patients were ordered strict rest and thus further exposure to the fumes of their verdant bedrooms. It was only at the turn of the century that public resistance forced wallpaper manufacturers to produce arsenic-free papers, a line that, absurdly, became a selling point in their marketing campaigns.
But the “go” colour kept on going, and has risen to great heights since its toxic nadir. Today green proudly represents our mission to save the planet, and is a political agenda, a verb and a symbol of hope. It is now the world’s second-favourite colour, behind blue.