Was there some kind of real-world instance or happening we can point to that caused purple to become the “royal colour”?
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Purple dye was hard to make. Look up the process there’s a pretty good YouTube video of a guy making it. But that’s basically the extent of it.
I’ve always heard it was because traditionally purple dye is very hard to come by. Traditional purple dyes were expensive and only royalty could afford them in large enough amounts to have garments or tapestry dyed purple.
Royal purple used to be the most expensive and difficult ~~die~~ dye to make.
It was made from Murex snails which were hard to find and you needed a significant number of them for a small amount of dye.
Since the dye was expensive it became associated with wealth and royalty
Purple pigment used to be extremely rare. It doesn’t appear much in nature so, it was rare, exclusive and only the royal could afford the color. We weren’t able to just synthesize color pigments back in the day.
To expand on other posts: the Tyrian snail (Tyre, Lebanon) was the only source of rich purple dyes (Phonetian, Royal, etc,) and thus it’s rarity and subsequently high price, made it incredibly desirable by the wealthy and noble. For a long time it was considered *so* rare, that it was illegal for anyone except the Emperor of Rome to wear purple within the empire.
It’s not that purple dye in general is hard to make (though that’s true), it’s because of one *particular* purple dye.
Tyrian purple, made from a few species of snails off the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, was a deep purple/red dye that did not fade. Its production was held in a monopoly by the Phoenicians, and it required a very large amount of labor to produce, which made it expensive.
Its use was always restricted mostly to priests and kings, but under the Romans and especially the Eastern Romans (Byzantines) it became associated exclusively with the Imperial throne – for example, there was a special room in the Great Palace of Constantinople made of purple stone that empresses would give birth in. This remained even after the creation of Tyrian purple was lost and they started using other dyes.
Almost all associations between royalty and purple trace directly to this association with the Roman emperors.
Before synthetics, purple dyes were extremely expensive. The best known was called [“Tyrian purple”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple#Royal_blue) which was produced from a certain species of sea snail. It was very resource and labor-intensive to produce, and therefore was only affordable by the wealthiest people, i.e. royalty. It is particularly associated with the Roman Empire and its successor state the Byzantine Empire.
You could’ve quite easily done a search for this question and had it answered better.
https://www.artsandcollections.com/a-history-of-the-colour-purple/
> Purple’s elite status stems from the rarity and cost of the dye originally used to produce it.
>Purple fabric used to be so outrageously expensive that only rulers could afford it. The dye initially used to make purple came from the Phoenician trading city of Tyre, which is now in modern-day Lebanon. Fabric traders obtained the dye from a small mollusk that was only found in the Tyre region of the Mediterranean Sea.
Do you really need a more simplified explanation than the top Google result?
I wish people would stop using the subreddit for every random question that pops into their head. It’s meant to ask questions about things that you need a more simplified explanation for.
> This subreddit is for asking for objective explanations. It is not a repository for any question you may have.
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