A dark brown earth pigment of lignite and humus, named for Anthony van Dyck though he probably never used it.

The pale yellow-green of Vaseline glass: uranium oxide melted into silica, fluorescing vivid neon-green under ultraviolet, produced from 1830s Bohemia until wartime requisition of uranium stocks halted civilian production in 1942-43.

The dark indigo wool issued to Federal soldiers in the American Civil War, standardised in 1861 and worn well into the Indian Wars.

Ground lapis lazuli from Afghan mines, once as costly as gold and reserved for the Virgin's robe.

A paler, pinker product of the same murex glands that made Tyrian purple, achieved by stopping the dyeing process before full oxidation.

The named gemstone whose Persian-via-French etymology means 'Turkish stone', mined for the Pharaohs in Sinai and the Apache in New Mexico.

The South Asian rhizome that dyes monks' robes and curry alike, brilliant in the moment and notorious for fading rapidly in sunlight.

A colourfast madder red whose multi-day, dung-and-rancid-oil recipe was guarded for centuries by Anatolian dyers and stolen by French industrial spies.

A short-lived blue from the spiderwort flower, used by ukiyo-e printmakers for under-drawings that vanished entirely once the print was washed.

The non-toxic 20th-century replacement for lead white, so opaque it accounts for most white paint, paper coatings and even sunscreen on Earth.

Charles Tiffany's signature box colour, chosen in 1845 to evoke the era's prized turquoise jewellery and now a registered trademark.

American shortening of phthalocyanine green, the workhorse green of mid-century house paints, plastics and printers' inks.

A muted green earth used as the underpainting for flesh tones in Italian Renaissance panel painting, lending many old saints their olive cast.

The biblical blue dye of Israelite priestly garments, lost for over a thousand years and recently re-identified with a Mediterranean sea snail.

An acid yellow azo dye patented in 1884 and now in nearly every commercial yellow icing, banned in Norway and Austria for decades.

The catch-all term for the brown polyphenols leached from oak galls and bark, the colour of every traditional leather workshop.

BASF's 1897 industrial synthesis of indigo, the dye that put Bengal plantations out of business and turned every pair of jeans the same shade of blue.

The orange-yellow azo dye of bottled energy drinks and supermarket cake, listed in the EU under the warning label for child hyperactivity.

The deep pine-soot ink of East Asian calligraphy, ground from solid sticks against a stone with a few drops of water before each session.

A yellow lake from buckthorn berries used in medieval illumination, prone to vanishing entirely from old manuscripts within a few centuries.