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A review by orchardoriole
Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay
3.0
This is a book about colors, sure. But it’s also a travelogue, and an art history discussion, and long exploration of paint. The travelogue, in particular, takes over the book for pages at a time.
Sometimes the travel is vicariously exhilarating. She braves the rough waters of Costa Rica in search of the purple dye of shellfish! And then she accidentally crashes a wedding!
Sometimes the travel seems a bit unnecessarily place dropping. She journeys to a town in India just so she can quiz people about...cow pee? (All right, that part was a little funny.)
And sometimes it’s impressively - if a bit bafflingly - reckless. In 2001, she attempts to get a Taliban visa so she can visit the lapis lazuli mines of Afghanistan. It doesn’t work, but she goes ahead visa-less and becomes one of the few women - and maybe the first woman - to enter the mines for the blue stone.
I believe she visits every continent in her color explorations, and I found myself frequently wondering how on earth she has the funds and the connections to pull off all these far-flung travels.
Unfortunately, for all her wanderings, she isn’t that riveting as a travel writer. The book does better when the author sticks to the stories of other people’s historic journeys. We needed less about herself and her travels, and more about the colors she’s traveling to find. Because she does have some fascinating factoids to share, like:
The brightest red in nature comes from squished Central American bugs called cochineals. The red is still used in some cosmetics and foods, including Cherry Coke. Yes, that’s right. When you drink Cherry Coke, you are drinking bugs.
The Greek monuments were originally brightly colored, but the White House was modeled after their white ruined versions. Some monuments, for example, originally had red and white striped columns. People were scandalized when they found out that the Greek monuments were not meant to be dignified, sedate, and monotone.
Isaac Newton added orange and indigo to the official rainbow colors in 1666. Mostly, Newton just wanted seven colors, because seven is a symbolically significant number, so he wanted a symbolically significant number of colors in the spectrum.
In the late 1700s, a popular green paint, called Scheele’s Green, contained arsenic. People knew it had arsenic, and they knew it was poisonous, but they really, really wanted bright green paint, so they used it anyway. The arsenic green was in Napoleon’s wallpaper and may have contributed, accidentally, to his death.
In the eighteenth century, a teenage girl took the lead in turning indigo into an American cash crop.
So, yes, there are a multitude of fun facts to be found in this book. But they are buried amid a multitude of travel stories. The travel stories may be fun too, but it’s a reasonable bet that if you picked up a book called “Colors”, you are not here to read about someone’s visa woes.
Sometimes the travel is vicariously exhilarating. She braves the rough waters of Costa Rica in search of the purple dye of shellfish! And then she accidentally crashes a wedding!
Sometimes the travel seems a bit unnecessarily place dropping. She journeys to a town in India just so she can quiz people about...cow pee? (All right, that part was a little funny.)
And sometimes it’s impressively - if a bit bafflingly - reckless. In 2001, she attempts to get a Taliban visa so she can visit the lapis lazuli mines of Afghanistan. It doesn’t work, but she goes ahead visa-less and becomes one of the few women - and maybe the first woman - to enter the mines for the blue stone.
I believe she visits every continent in her color explorations, and I found myself frequently wondering how on earth she has the funds and the connections to pull off all these far-flung travels.
Unfortunately, for all her wanderings, she isn’t that riveting as a travel writer. The book does better when the author sticks to the stories of other people’s historic journeys. We needed less about herself and her travels, and more about the colors she’s traveling to find. Because she does have some fascinating factoids to share, like:
The brightest red in nature comes from squished Central American bugs called cochineals. The red is still used in some cosmetics and foods, including Cherry Coke. Yes, that’s right. When you drink Cherry Coke, you are drinking bugs.
The Greek monuments were originally brightly colored, but the White House was modeled after their white ruined versions. Some monuments, for example, originally had red and white striped columns. People were scandalized when they found out that the Greek monuments were not meant to be dignified, sedate, and monotone.
Isaac Newton added orange and indigo to the official rainbow colors in 1666. Mostly, Newton just wanted seven colors, because seven is a symbolically significant number, so he wanted a symbolically significant number of colors in the spectrum.
In the late 1700s, a popular green paint, called Scheele’s Green, contained arsenic. People knew it had arsenic, and they knew it was poisonous, but they really, really wanted bright green paint, so they used it anyway. The arsenic green was in Napoleon’s wallpaper and may have contributed, accidentally, to his death.
In the eighteenth century, a teenage girl took the lead in turning indigo into an American cash crop.
So, yes, there are a multitude of fun facts to be found in this book. But they are buried amid a multitude of travel stories. The travel stories may be fun too, but it’s a reasonable bet that if you picked up a book called “Colors”, you are not here to read about someone’s visa woes.