I'm Vinu, the one person behind Storied Colors, and this is the first issue of its newsletter. More than fifteen hundred of you have signed up, many back in June when the site reached the Hacker News front page, and in the four months since I have sent you nothing. I spent that time re-checking the sources behind every entry in the catalogue, around a day job, and the letter kept slipping to next week. I am sorry for the silence.

On 28 October The New York Times included Storied Colors in its Good List and pointed readers at the kakishibu entry, a dye made from unripe persimmons. Readers started writing to me directly the same day. So it goes out now, before I can polish it any further.

Below is the first journal essay, on the greens, whites, yellows and reds that poisoned the people who made and wore them. Expect a letter roughly every other week from here on, alternating an essay with a short digest of new entries. How the site is made, AI drafting included, is on the About page.

If anything here does not hold up, write to [email protected]. I read every message.

For most of the history of painting, some of the loveliest colours a painter could buy were quietly lethal. Not in a dramatic, cordoned-off way. They were in the wallpaper. They were in the ballgowns. For a while they may even have been in the sweets.

The greens were the worst of it. Scheele's Green and its brighter successor Paris Green took their colour from arsenic, and through the nineteenth century they turned up anywhere a household could put a colour: printed wallpapers, painted toys, artificial flowers, dress fabric. The pigment was cheap and brilliant. That it was also arsenic seemed, for a remarkably long time, to be treated as a manageable detail.

It caught up with people slowly, and then specifically. In 1861 a young London woman named Matilda Scheurer, an artificial-flower maker who had spent months breathing the green powder, died of arsenic poisoning. The accounts from the time describe the whites of her eyes turned green, and that everything she looked at seemed green to her.

What makes the green pigments such a strange chapter is not that they were dangerous. Plenty of things were. It is that everyone slowly figured out they were dangerous and kept using them anyway, for decades. Doctors noticed that people in green rooms got sick. The explanation people reached for was that damp walls and mould could act on the arsenic in the paper and release a toxic gas into the air, so the wallpaper did not even have to be touched to do harm. Later chemists would question how much of the sickness that gas could really account for, but the conviction that a green room could poison the air had already taken hold.

The deadliest colours were not all green. White lead had been the painter's and the cosmetic-maker's white since antiquity, and it poisoned in the studio and on the face, a harm doctors had been writing about since before the Renaissance. The brilliant yellows and oranges that painters reached for, orpiment and realgar, were arsenic sulphides. Vermilion, the deep warm red prized for centuries, was mercury. The palette that produced some of the most beautiful objects we have was, ingredient by ingredient, a small cabinet of poisons.

So why did it last so long? Part of the answer is that the colours were simply too good to give up. Scheele's Green was brilliant and far cheaper than the standard verdigris of the day, and Paris Green was brighter and more saturated still. For a manufacturer, and for a painter, the cheaper, brighter colour was the obvious choice, and the danger sat at one remove, spread thinly across the people who made the wallpaper, wore the dress, or slept in the room. The person choosing the pigment was rarely the person it killed.

The other part of the answer is that stopping it was slow, patchy work. Concern about the arsenic greens mounted through the mid-nineteenth century, and formal restrictions arrived in several countries from the 1870s. In Britain it was public-health campaigning that shamed the wallpaper trade out of them by the 1880s. Even so, Scheele's Green was still being printed onto wallpaper rolls into the 1890s.

Lead was the one that finally drew an international line, and it took until the twentieth century. In 1921 the International Labour Organization adopted a convention banning white lead in interior paint for professional decorators in the states that signed it, one of the earliest international occupational-health conventions. The painters' guilds had tracked the deaths of their colourmen and grinders for centuries. The serious, binding restriction came that late.

That is the thread I kept pulling on. The poison on the palette was never really a secret. It was known, and tolerated, and built into daily life, because the colour was wanted and the harm was someone else's. The pigments in this story are some of the most beautiful the catalogue holds. They are also a quiet record of how long people will live alongside a known danger when it wears a colour they love.

If you want to follow the individual colours from this issue, they are all in the catalogue: Scheele's Green, Paris Green, Lead White, orpiment, realgar, and vermilion.

New entries go up through the week. Thank you for reading, and for being here at the start.