Color: Carmine | Country: Santiago, Chile

For centuries, red was rare and precious—a source of wealth and power for those who could unlock its secrets and worn by those who had power and social status. Nothing was more prized than cochineal/carmine, a red dye that produced the brightest, strongest red the Old World had ever seen. When the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire (1518–1521), they encountered Aztec warriors garbed in an unknown crimson color. Cochineal became their second most valuable export from the New World, after silver, and the Spanish zealously guarded the secret of its production.

Carmine lake, also called crimson lake, was originally produced from the cochineal insect, native to Central and South America. A lake pigment is a pigment made by precipitating a dye with an inert binder, or mordant, usually a metallic salt. Unlike vermilion, ultramarine, and other pigments made from ground minerals, lake pigments are organic. In recent years the attempts to make synthetic Carmine has proven to be complex and expensive to produce. Carmine is a fugitive color, meaning it is highly sensitive to light and tends to fade to brown , particularly in watercolor. Carmine was also used by nineteenth-century artists such as Vincent van Gogh in Bedroom in Arles (1889). The floor of the bedroom is painted with carmine cochineal lake, geranium lake and indigo. This produced a reddish color, which over time changed to blueish.

A fascinating book to read is A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Butler Greenfield

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