Why was purple pigment history difficult to produce? Couldn’t ascestors have just mixed red and blue, instead of laboriously extracting it from sea snails?

Question

Why was purple pigment history difficult to produce? Couldn’t ascestors have just mixed red and blue, instead of laboriously extracting it from sea snails?

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

>Couldn’t ascestors have just mixed red and blue, instead of laboriously extracting it from sea snails?

Yeah, but it looks like crap. It gets wet and the red runs more than the blue, and it comes out all splotchy, and your customer looks like a poor person pretending to be rich, which is worse than not looking rich at all. And even before that happens, the color is never quite right.