Purple's full story: from the rarest dye in history to the hex codes dominating crypto, beauty and AI brands

The use of the most expensive colour in ancient times.

Purple wasn't just a luxury before the industrial age. It was a law that was to be observed.

Artisans near the Phoenician sea-trading port of modern-day Lebanon had found that the fluid which seeped from the Murex sea snail turned into a brilliant blue-violet dye when it was exposed to sunlight. The resulting compound, dibromoindigo, resulted in the deepest and most stable colour known in the old world, making it the most valuable product. The work was extremely hard: it takes about 10,000 snails for 1 gram of dye. It was said that the odor during production was unimaginable; a foul, sulphurous odor that lingered for weeks on the workers.

The resulting colour was dubbed Tyrian purple, after the Phoenician city of Tyre, and was in the dark, almost indigo weighted red-violet range that would be referred to later as #4B0082. It was worn only by Roman emperors. Opponents of Julius Caesar were executed for wearing it without permission. The ruling class of the Byzantine empire were known as porphyrogennetos, or "born in the purple." During the Middle Ages in Europe, it was sacred and only belonged to cardinals. Purple was not just a symbol of wealth. At times in history it was an actual crime to be wearing if you were not the right person!

The 18-year-old that unwittingly Democratised Purple.

William Henry Perkin, a chemistry student, was attempting to make quinine, an antimalarial drug, in his makeshift laboratory in his home in London, England in 1856. He failed. What he had unintentionally created, however, was the first synthetic dye ever made, a reddish purple dye he originally named "Tyrian purple" and later renamed "mauveine."

Perkin was 18 years of age. He patented it, he established a factory, and he became quite rich. Yards of the colour that had been reserved for emperors and high priests became available to everyone. Within a few years, mauve was all around in Victorian clothes and had become so pervasive that Victorian critics called the trend "mauve measles." Queen Victoria wore it on the day of her daughter's wedding. The aristocracy was in a rage.

The shade that Perkin had made was closer to #800080, a flat, fully saturated shade that was equal parts red and blue. The synthetic version was shallower than Tyrian dye but more reliable and cheaper. Cheap purple, for the first time in human history.

What is the meaning of the counterculture, cosmos and prince?

Purple's democratic transformation did not make it commonplace. Instead, it took on a new set of cultural significance which would end up influencing it in the modern era.

Then in the 1960s it turned to purple and became part of the psychedelia of Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze, blacklight posters and other altered-state imagery. The colour's ambiguity was useful because it wasn't warm or cool, masculine or feminine, earthly or celestial. It was somewhere between states—just what the counterculture sought to represent.

Prince arrived, and turned purple into a personal mythology that lasted 40 years. His favorite shade, closer to #9B59B6, was warmer and more welcoming than imperial violet, and it became inseparable from his identity.

Meanwhile, the New Age movement declared purple as the colour of the Third Eye, the Crown Chakra and spiritual insight. Crystals, tarot and aromatherapy made purple an instantly recognizable symbol of intuition and metaphysics. This association would later become commercially valuable.

Why Purple Has No Dominant Wavelength

Before the digital turn, it is worth pausing on a curious fact about purple that distinguishes it from virtually every other colour.

Violet exists in the visible spectrum. Purple does not. There is no wavelength of light that we perceive as purple. Instead, the brain creates it by mixing signals from red and blue cone cells—a perceptual construction with no direct physical counterpart. In a very real sense, purple only exists as an interpretation.

This has not escaped brand strategists.

The Digital Purple: Crypto, AI, Beauty

In the early years of consumer tech, purple barely featured. Silicon Valley defaulted to blue—the colour of trust, authority and IBM. But as a new wave of industries emerged in the 2010s, three of them independently converged on the same part of the spectrum.

Cryptocurrency needed a colour with no incumbent owner. Blue meant banking. Green meant money. Red meant danger. Orange had already been claimed by Bitcoin. Purple occupied unclaimed territory; it felt futuristic and value-laden without the institutional weight of blue or the aggression of red. Coinbase, Phantom, Polygon and dozens of smaller protocols all landed in the violet-to-purple range.

AI companies faced a similar positioning problem. They needed to feel neither corporate nor playful, neither cold nor warm. The lilac end of the spectrum—roughly #9B59B6 and its neighbours—occupies exactly that register. It suggests intelligence without intimidation and novelty without frivolity. Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude, uses a purple-adjacent palette. Dozens of AI startups have followed.

Beauty brands came to purple through a different route: inheritance. Cadbury had been using a specific shade of purple since 1914, conditioning generations of consumers to associate it with indulgence and quality. Fenty Beauty, NYX and other modern cosmetics lines tapped into that encoded meaning—purple as luxury, femininity and something worth paying for.

Three industries selling entirely different things—trustless transactions, self-transformation and machine intelligence—each arrived at the same colour through different reasoning. The convergence was not coordinated. It was simply the market solving for the same emotional brief.

The Four Shades of a Long History

The palette at the top of this piece traces that arc across four hex codes.

Invasive Indigo (#4B0082) is the ancient end—dark, oxidised and close to the original Tyrian dye. The name itself contains the tension: indigo as a plant-based dye that was also considered invasive and monopolistic in the colonial spice trade.

Patriarch (#800080) is Perkin's purple, the clean synthetic hue, equal parts red and blue, reproducible at scale. The name acknowledges what the colour had historically protected: patriarchal power structures enforced through sumptuary law.

Deep Lilac (#9B59B6) is the contemporary purple—warm, approachable and commonly found in product interfaces, cosmetics packaging and crypto app icons. It is premium without feeling intimidating.

Mousse aux Pruneaux (#E8D5F5) is the pastel end of the range—purple dissolved into near-white, more scent than statement. It appears in high-end skincare, luxury stationery and AI product landing pages. Purple becomes atmosphere rather than assertion.

What Purple Tells Us About Colour and Power

Every primary colour carries a cultural autobiography. Red gets anger and love. Blue gets calm and authority. Yellow gets optimism and cowardice. But purple's story is unusual because it is almost entirely about economics and access.

For most of human history, the question "what does purple mean?" had a simple answer: it means you are allowed to wear it. Meaning was enforced by law, not projected by culture. When Perkin destroyed that barrier in 1856, purple had to find new meanings from scratch, and it did so by absorbing whatever was on the cultural frontier at each moment: mysticism, rebellion, gender fluidity and techno-utopianism.

The colour is currently in its most commercially dominant phase since the height of the Byzantine empire. The difference is that this time, anyone can afford it.

Colour references:
Invasive Indigo #4B0082 · Patriarch #800080 · Deep Lilac #9B59B6 · Mousse aux Pruneaux #E8D5F5 · via coloors.net