alizarin-crimson

Lidia Yuknavitch mentions Alizarin crimson twice in The Small Backs of Children combined with bruise blue.

Alizarin is a deep red color with a blue undertone, named after the organic dye alizarin from the madder plant. A dye is a colored substance that chemically bonds to the material to which it is being applied. This distinguishes dyes from pigments which do not chemically bind to the material they color. It’s also known by the names 1,2-dihydroxyanthraquinone, Mordant Red 11, C.I. 58000 and Turkey Red where CI stands for color index international. Whats that? First printed in 1924, it is a reference database jointly maintained by SDC Enterprises and the American Association of Textile Chemists and Coloristscurrently containing over 27,000 individual products listed under 13,000 Colour Index Generic Names.

Also from Wikipedia here are a few

Animal-derived dyes

• Cochineal insect (red)
• Cow urine (Indian yellow)
• Lac insect (red, violet)
• Murex snail (purple, indigo blue)
• Octopus/Cuttlefish (sepia brown)

Plant-derived dyes

• Black walnut or black walnut hulls (brown, black, source of tannin)
• Catechu or cutch tree (brown)
• Gamboge tree resin (dark mustard yellow)
• Chestnut hulls (peach to brown)
• Ebony leaves (black)
• Himalayan rhubarb root (bronze, yellow)
• Indigo leaves (blue to purple)
• Kamala seed pods (yellow)
• Katuray (red)
• Madder root (red, pink, orange)
• Mangosteen peel (green, brown, dark brown, purple, crimson)
• Narra wood (red)
• Myrobalan fruit (yellow, green, black, source of tannin)
• Noni roots (red)
• Pomegranate rind (yellow)
• Sappanwood (red)
• Teak leaf (crimson to maroon)
• Sumac or staghorn sumac tree (brown, source of tannin)
• Turmeric roots (yellow)
• Weld herb (yellow)

More on Alizarin crimson.

Our friend hexidecimal: #E32636. It’s the background of this screen.

Dig this:

• ISCC–NBS descriptor: Vivid reddish orange

What?!?!

The ISCC–NBS System of Color Designation is a system for naming colors based on a set of 13 basic color terms and a small set of adjective modifiers. It was first established in the 1930s by a joint effort of the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC), made up of delegates from various American trade organizations, and the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), a US government agency.

Fuck! Color term:

• A word or phrase that refers to a specific color. The color term may refer to human perception of that color (which is affected by visual context) which is usually defined according to the Munsell color system, or to an underlying physical property (such as a specific wavelength on the spectrum of visible light). There are also numerical systems of color specification, referred to as color spaces.

More about color terms here

The Hue; Saturation; Light representation (implementation? generation?) of Alizarin crimson is 354.9°, 77.1, 52.

In other news Israel continues its stubborn existence as a neo-colonial extension racist of Western Empire and is now exchanging bombs and missiles with Iran.

And a so-called security consultant dressed as a cop assassinated one democratic representative and her husband, attempting to also assassinate another in Minnesota this week.

The assassin is still at large and we wonder if the cops on scene were trying all that hard to apprehend him.

Apparently that had once been a thing called “The Mother of All HTML Colo(u)r Charts”, but it’s currently… well, not there. Gone the way of Hell.com.

Hell.com is an internet domain which has achieved a degree of notoriety due to its name, and an intentionally mysterious website that existed there from August 1995 to 2009 created by the first registrant of the domain, artist Kenneth Aronson. is an internet domain which has achieved a degree of notoriety due to its name, and an intentionally mysterious website that existed there from August 1995 to 2009 created by the first registrant of the domain, artist Kenneth Aronson.

Perhaps colors can remedy father’s day self pity. A sad practice. Books, music, sex, breath, beauty, walks. Better endeavors. Frida Kahlo and Vincent Van Gogh with choice chemicals, paint and a week. This brings some happiness (provided it doesn’t go the way of Hell.com): https://colorguide.org.

It has content like:

200 Types of Muted Colors

80 Types of Scarlet

What is Azure? (28 Colors)

15/06/2025