Crimson

What color is crimson?

The story of crimson

Crimson gets its name from a bug crushed on an oak leaf, and its modern color from a different bug crushed on a cactus.

The word starts with kermes, Kermes vermilio, a scale insect that lives on oaks around the Mediterranean and was gathered and dried for its red dye. The name traveled with the trade: Arabic qirmizi became medieval Latin cremesinus, softened into Old French cramoisi, and settled into English as crimson by around 1400, referring to both the insect and the dye. It took ten to twelve times as much kermes as the insect that would eventually beat it in the market to dye a cloth the same depth of red.

Cochineal is a different insect entirely, Dactylopius coccus, which lives on prickly pear cactus in Mexico, nowhere near an oak tree. The Aztecs farmed it long before the Spanish arrived: eleven towns conquered by the empire paid a yearly tribute of two thousand decorated cotton blankets and forty bags of cochineal dye each, and the insect shows up as a pigment in Aztec manuscripts as well as a dye for cloth. The first shipments reached Seville in 1523, and once the trade was running, carmine, the dye made from the insect, became the region's second most valuable export after silver. It takes about seventy thousand dried insects to make one pound of it. Spain guarded the source as a monopoly until 1820, when the French finally learned to cultivate the insect themselves.

Painters call the pigment version carmine lake: cochineal extract boiled up and precipitated onto alum, the same trick used to turn any dye into a solid paint. Michelangelo used it. So did the dyers behind the crimson fabrics of the Hussars, the Turks, British redcoats and, later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, all wearing cloth colored by the same insect that ends up in a paint tube. The catch is durability: carmine dyes fade quickly, and a red that survives beautifully on wool or silk can vanish from a watercolor wash in a few summers on a windowsill.

The tube labeled crimson today is rarely either insect. Alizarin crimson (PR83) took over from both for a while, and it fades for the same reason lakes always fade. Paint makers now build permanent crimsons from tougher synthetics: quinacridone (PV19), benzamida carmine (PR176) and pyrrole rubine (PR264), alone or blended, chosen because none of them give up their color in a sunny window. Read the pigment codes on the tube. The name on the front has meant three different chemistries in four hundred years and will probably mean a fourth before you finish the one you own now.

Cochineal itself never really left. It survives as E120, the food dye in yogurt, candy and fruit juice, and in lipstick and rouge, because the instability that ruins a watercolor wash barely matters in something used up within a year. It is also why some people avoid it on an ingredient list: carmine is an insect product, which makes it unacceptable to vegetarian and vegan diets and, under most readings of Islamic dietary law, forbidden outright. I like knowing that the paint box, a container of strawberry yogurt and an Aztec tribute list are, underneath the branding, arguing about the same bug.

Pigment facts

These describe the pigment in general. Every brand's tube behaves a little differently, so test yours on scrap paper.

How to mix crimson

Crimson is easy to reach today, it just is not the same chemistry it used to be. Any cool, blue-leaning red will do the job: quinacridone rose, a permanent alizarin crimson, or a touch of vermilion to warm a dull one back up. If you want the softer, pinker cousin instead of this cooler one, that is rose madder, and it deserves its own page rather than a footnote on this one.

The pairing that matters is a cool red with a whisper of its opposite. Deepen a crimson with a speck of green or blue rather than black and it stays a color instead of turning to soot, which is the entire difference between a shadow that reads as wine and a shadow that reads as dirt.

Using crimson in watercolor

Use crimson where a red needs to sit back rather than shout: the shadow side of a rose, wine in a glass, the folds of a dark red cloth. It is the cool half of the red family, the one that recedes, where scarlet and vermilion push forward.

Glazing is what the old lake pigments were built for, and the habit is worth keeping even with modern paints. A thin crimson wash over a dry yellow makes an orange no mixed orange matches, and over a pale blue it makes a violet with air in it. Let each layer dry first or you will lift what is underneath.

It pairs hardest against green. A blue-green next to crimson looks cooler and the crimson looks warmer, and mixed together the two make one of the more useful darks in a watercolor box.

One thing I learned the hard way: check the pigment code before you commit a painting to a sunny wall. My first tube of crimson was old-formula alizarin, and a small study with a crimson sky lost its sky within two summers on a windowsill. I only buy the quinacridone or pyrrole versions now, and I still test a scrap swatch in the window before I trust a new tube.

Crimson vs scarlet (and burgundy)

Scarlet is crimson's warmer cousin, an orange-leaning red where crimson leans blue. Line them up and scarlet jumps forward on the page while crimson sits back, which is the whole reason painters keep both rather than mixing one lighter and darker.

Burgundy is crimson gone dark and dusty, closer to the color of the bottle than the glass. Where crimson is a clean, cool red at full strength, a good burgundy already has some darkness built into it, mixed the right way rather than the flat way.

If crimson is a glass of red wine held to the light, scarlet is the same wine spilled on a white tablecloth, and burgundy is what is left in the bottle the next morning.

More color stories

Mel, founder of Tobio'sI make portable watercolor kits and I named the company after my cat. I write these pages for the beginner I used to be, one pigment at a time.