ExclusiveThe Amazing Discovery of Mauve_ From Lab to Fashion

An 18-year-old science student, William H. Perkins, was challenged by his professor to synthesize quinine. While working on this, he came across a purple substance in the things that he was mixing and creating in the laboratory, and he realized it was a very nice color. As a matter of fact, it's very similar to the color of this dress I'm wearing, and that color was named mauve after the French term for the mallow plant. And it quickly became very popular as a fabric dye. It was used to dye silks and other colors, and within a few years, it was the color to wear. It was labeled mauvine, or also known as mauveine or mauvin. It's many different ways to pronounce it. That's the more scientific term. Around the end of the 19th century, food dye began to be used. We can tell it is by the fact that it was mentioned in the Pure Food and Cosmetic Act of 1906. So in the 20s and 30s, more studies were done, and then the FDA was founded in 1938 by Franklin Roosevelt. And they started cracking down on different dyes that they thought might have bad health impacts. We like to think of butter as having this nice yellow color, and if it didn't, they'd put some food coloring in. And then when margarine became popular, that always had yellow food coloring because they wanted it to have that nice buttery look, and naturally it's very pale and colorless.