The first use of the word mauve as a color was in 1796–98 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but its use seems to have been rare before 1859.

[10] Perkin was so successful in marketing his discovery to the dye industry that his 2000 biography by Simon Garfield is simply entitled Mauve.

The weekly journal All the Year Round described women wearing the colour as "all flying countryward, like so many migrating birds of purple paradise".

[12] Punch magazine published cartoons poking fun at the huge popularity of the colour: "The Mauve Measles are spreading to so serious an extent that it is high time to consider by what means [they] may be checked.

[16] The 1890s are sometimes referred to in retrospect as the "Mauve Decade" because of the popularity of the subtle color among progressive artistic types, both in Europe and the US.