The most dangerous and prohibited paints

When you were a child and were drawing, did you think that paints can bring not only the joy of creativity, but also a danger to one’s health?

Fortunately, the paints that will be discussed in this review cannot be bought in a store. Some of them are toxic and some are copyrighted. But one thing unites them - all these paints are prohibited for use.

• 7. Brown mummy (or Egyptian brown)

  By the 16th century, despite legal restrictions, the export of mummies from Egypt to Europe in order to crush them and use as "medicine" had become big business.

  Considering that Europeans enjoyed eating, drinking and rubbing the crushed parts of mummies into their bodies, one should not be surprised to learn that they also painted with the help of mummies. The product they used was called "Mummy Brown" or Egyptian brown. This rich brown pigment was obtained from mummy flesh mixed with white resin and myrrh.

  As early as 1712, an artist's shop opened in Paris, jokingly called "A La Momie". Paints and varnishes were sold there, as well as crushed mummy flesh, incense and myrrh.

  This pigment was used by colorists until the 20th century.

• 6. Vermilion (aka Chinese Red)

  You definitely won't want to create this paint at home. The thing is that the rich red pigment is obtained from a mercury mineral called cinnabar. And mercury, as you know, is not good for one's health.

  Vermilion contains just a bit less than 90% mercury. It has been used in cosmetics and of course in art. It was used to decorate medieval manuscripts, and for painting of the Renaissance, and even in the Middle Kingdom. The Chinese mixed this pigment with tree sap and used it to paint temples and pottery, and as ink.

• 5. Vantablack

  So far, it is impossible to be blacker than this substance of carbon nanotubes, which absorbs 99.965% of the light that hits it. The color, developed by the British company Surrey NanoSystems, was even listed in the Guinness Book of Records.

  But alas, only one person on Earth received carte blanche to use the “blackest black” in art - the Indian-British sculptor Anish Kapoor. He may be known to you from the sculpture "Cloud Gate" in the form of a huge mirror bean, located in Chicago.

  “This is the blackest material in the universe after black holes,” Kapoor told Artforum in 2015. And he added that this color "exists between materiality and illusion."

  However, not all of Kapoor's colleagues were delighted to learn that they were forbidden to use vantablack in their work. So, artist Stuart Semple created several other colors, including "Pinkest Pink" (ultrafluorescent pink paint), "Black 2.0", "Black 3.0" and "Diamond Dust". They can be used by anyone in the world...except Anish Kapoor.

  Here is an example of black pigment created by Semple

• 4. Schloss Green, aka Scheele Green

  One of the most dangerous colors was invented in 1775 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a German-Swedish scientist who combined solutions of sodium arsenite and copper sulfate to make copper hydrogen arsenite. It is a chemical compound containing arsenic.

  Scheele green has proven to be a highly unstable pigment that has been used in many household items such as wallpaper, candles, children's toys, and even food coloring. It was cheap and easy to produce and soon replaced other greens that were in vogue at the time.

  Despite the fact that factory workers often fell ill, women in green dresses fainted, and rooms painted with this color mysteriously remained free from insects, this paint was considered harmless.

  There is even an alleged connection between the green Scheele and Napoleon's death: it says that in 1815, during his exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon's favorite color was green, and the rooms in the Longwood House mansion where he lived were decorated with green wallpaper containing copper arsenite. It was rumored that Napoleon liked to take long baths. And the temperature and humidity turn green Scheele into a deadly cocktail.

• 3. Uranium orange

  And this paint that is now banned appeared relatively recently - in the 20th century. And it was used not in painting, but for the production of ceramic products from the Fiesta Red line. Uranium oxide was used to create "Uranium Orange".

  In the 50s of the last century, the production of these cheerful orange dishes was suspended, there was too little uranium, and it was saved for military purposes. When production resumed, the creators of Fiesta Red used a different form of uranium - depleted. It is less radioactive than uranium oxide.

  Fiesta dishes were produced until 1972, and are still popular with collectors, although is not recommended eating from such dishes.

• 2. Green radium.

  A century ago, glow-in-the-dark watches were an irresistible novelty. The dials, covered with a special luminescent paint, glowed all the time and did not require recharging in the sun. It was like magic.

  One of the first factories to manufacture these watches opened in New Jersey in 1916. It employed about 70 women, the first of thousands employed in many similar factories in the United States.

  For the delicate task of applying paint to tiny dials, women were ordered to lick the brushes to sharpen their tips. But the paint made the watch glow because it contained radium, a radioactive element whose properties are not fully understood.

  Subsequently, the women who worked with radium paint became infamous as the "Radium Girls". Because of this work, they developed serious diseases, including anemia, radium jaw (wear and tear of the jaw bones) and fatal cancerous tumors. However, green radium paint ceased to be used only in 1968.

• 1. Gamboge

  It is a sunny yellow, translucent shade, light and golden, like early autumn aspen leaves. The main ingredient for its creation was gamboj, a strong laxative and diuretic obtained from the sap of deciduous trees that grow mainly in Cambodia. It irritates the skin and can be fatal if ingested.

  Gamboge first came to Europe in the early 1600s through the East India Company. The pigment takes its name from Camboja, an old form of Cambodia's name.

  It is a beautiful but short-lived paint, which makes it difficult for art historians to find examples of the use of gamboge. We know that it was used in traditional Chinese painting and can be seen in some of Rembrandt's works.

  Art supply stores continued to sell gamboge until the 1980s, when it was discovered that one batch of pigments had been collected from a Khmer Rouge murder site. The gamboge was finally replaced by its safer version called New gamboge in 2005.