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A glass bowl of deep red cherries gleams on the dining room table. As you reach for a piece of the shiny fruit you remember your mother’s stern look and admonition to eat them anywhere but over her good white tablecloth. You know why she’s so adamant about it too! Last summer, just as you bit into a sweet cherry, a little juice squirted right out onto the tablecloth. That bright red stain stubbornly clung to the fabric despite heroic attempts to remove it.

Well, you may not have made your mom too happy and you probably won’t ever eat a cherry around a white damask tablecloth again, but you have discovered an ancient and very practical bit of knowledge. We can recreate the vivid colors that Mother Nature displays all around us and we can do it with her very own paint box!

We can make colors from two substances that are found throughout nature, dyes and pigments. Dyes come from plants, animals and insects. They can be dissolved in water or other liquids and are used mostly to color fabrics.

People all over the world have found amazing ways to add color to their daily lives. Berry juice was a common dye used to stain lips and cheeks in an early version of lipstick and blush. The Romans discovered that a little snail from the Mediterranean Sea provided a jewel-like purple dye for the clothing of the rich and important members of their community.

Sources for blue dyes were rare, but just about everyone from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks to the English, Japanese, and Mexicans, discovered that by boiling the Indigo plant you could create a beautiful and rich blue color. In Central and South America, a tiny red female insect was collected from the local cactus to make a red dye. The insects were boiled, dried, and mashed into powder.

Pigments can also be found in plants and animals. Leaves are green because of a pigment called chlorophyll and carrots owe their orange color to the pigment beta-carotene. Even our skin color is determined by a pigment known as melanin.

However, most pigments are made from minerals or metals. Pigments are solid and cannot be dissolved. They are usually ground into a powder and are the basic ingredient in all paints. Whether you use oil, acrylic or metal paint, pigments are the essential ingredient. To make paint you mix solid bits of pigment with a sticky liquid or “binder.”

Some of the first paints were simply ground up earth or clay mixed with spit or fat! Cavemen used charcoal from burned logs mixed with animal fat to create black and gray drawings on their cave walls. By noticing a rusty color in rock faces and hollows, they discovered mineral deposits of iron oxide. They were able to use it to add the color red to their drawings. This red, so much like the color of blood, became a symbol of the life force and the cavemen traveled far and wide to find the sacred iron oxide for their artwork.

From the time of the earliest humans until fairly recently, all dyes and pigments were found in the natural world. Then in the 1850s a British chemist named William Perkins was working on an experiment when he accidentally made a substance he named “mauveine.” Mauveine colored things mauve or a delicate pale purple. It was the world’s first artificial dye.

Chemists started researching what natural dyes and pigments were made of and worked to find ways to duplicate them in the laboratory with various chemicals. And they haven’t stopped since! But now besides recreating the colors of nature, they are also inventing whole new ranges of bright and crazy colors for us to delight in. Which, of the thousands of choices, is your favorite color?