Pigment

Pigments are completely or nearly insoluble and chemically unreactive in water or another medium; in contrast, dyes are colored substances which are soluble or go into solution at some stage in their use.

Pigments of prehistoric and historic value include ochre, charcoal, and lapis lazuli.

[3] According to an April 2018 report by Bloomberg Businessweek, the estimated value of the pigment industry globally is $30 billion.

Pigments and paint grinding equipment believed to be between 350,000 and 400,000 years old have been reported in a cave at Twin Rivers, near Lusaka, Zambia.

Pigments based on minerals and clays often bear the name of the city or region where they were originally mined.

These pigments were among the easiest to synthesize, and chemists created modern colors based on the originals.

These were more consistent than colors mined from the original ore bodies, but the place names remained.

[8] The first known synthetic pigment was Egyptian blue, which is first attested on an alabaster bowl in Egypt dated to Naqada III (circa 3250 BC).

[12] It was the blue pigment par excellence of Roman antiquity; its art technological traces vanished in the course of the Middle Ages until its rediscovery in the context of the Egyptian campaign and the excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

[citation needed] Since mango leaves are nutritionally inadequate for cattle, the practice of harvesting Indian yellow was eventually declared to be inhumane.

These dyes ushered in the flourishing of organic chemistry, including systematic designs of colorants.

In the CII schema, each pigment has a generic index number that identifies it chemically, regardless of proprietary and historic names.

An American paint manufacturer, Grumbacher, registered an alternate spelling (Thanos Blue) as a trademark.

Colour Index International resolves all these conflicting historic, generic, and proprietary names so that manufacturers and consumers can identify the pigment (or dye) used in a particular color product.

The following are some of the attributes of pigments that determine their suitability for particular manufacturing processes and applications: Swatches are used to communicate colors accurately.

Generally, the medium that offers the broadest gamut of color shades is widely used across diverse media.

Computer displays in general fail to show the true chroma of many pigments, but the hue and lightness can be reproduced with relative accuracy.

Averaged measurements of pigment samples will only yield approximations of their true appearance under a specific source of illumination.

Computer display systems use a technique called chromatic adaptation transforms[22] to emulate the correlated color temperature of illumination sources, and cannot perfectly reproduce the intricate spectral combinations originally seen.

Many conditions affect the levels or nature of pigments in plant, animal, some protista, or fungus cells.