By: Elijah Buck, Fox Cities
In current times, almost every single color imaginable can be bought to be painted onto paper, canvas, or almost any other kind of material imaginable, though not the same can be said about pigments. Pigments are a group of compounds that are intensely colored and are used to change the color of other materials. Pigments are what gives paint its color. While you can mix pigments to reach almost any color you want, there are some pigments that are much, much, rarer than any others. Centuries ago if you wanted something of a certain color you couldn’t take a drive to your nearest Home Depot to flip through books, use technology, or get little pots of paint to try. Depending on the color you would have to travel halfway across the planet to a remote place to get that very specific hue that you wanted. Nowadays, though pigments are much more widespread with transportation evolving to great lengths allowing shipping across the seven continents, there are still some pigments that are hard to get. In Harvard, there’s a collection of over 2,500 pigments known as the Forbes Pigment Collection that specializes in housing and collecting some of the rarest pigments around the world. While it no longer sees much use in utilizing these pigments for coloring purposes, many of the pigments are now used in scientific analysis to provide standard pigments to be compared with unknown ones. This can be used to do things like identify unknown pigments to see where the painter might have lived or to see if a painting is fraudulent or authentic. This is similar to the ideals and concepts of how forensic science is used. One example of this was done in 2007 when a Jackson Pollock painting was discovered to be fraudulent after pigment analysis was used to reveal that the specific red color used was actually first manufactured/discovered 20 years after the artist’s passing. The pigment known as Red 254 was a byproduct of a chemical reaction known as Ferrari Red. Some of the most rare pigments housed in the collection and in the world are Mummy Brown, extract from the resin used on the wrappings of egyptian mummies; Tyrian Purple, pigment derived from a predatory snail that required many to make a sufficient amount of pigment; Indian Yellow, pigment derived from the urine of cattle in the Bihar province of India that were fed only mango leaves and water; and Lapis Lazuli, derived from ground lapis lazuli gemstones.