You want things just right when you're paying all that money, don't you? The Queen certainly does: as we discovered this week, she issues a list of royal demands before arriving at foreign hotels. She doesn't want the management to think she's fussy, you understand, but could they please make sure that any flower arrangements do not contain anything mauve (or carnations of any colour) . . . - A six-page Buckingham Palace memo reaches the press. From the London Evening Standard, November 1999

The local spy - and there was one - might thus have deduced that these two were strangers, people of some taste, and not to be denied their enjoyment of the Cobb by a mere harsh wind . . . he would most certainly have remarked that they were people of a very superior taste as regards their outward appearance.
The young lady was dressed in the height of fashion, for another wind was blowing in 1867: the beginning of a revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet. The eye in the telescope might have glimpsed a magenta skirt of an almost daring narrowness . . .
The colour of the young lady's clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident; but the world was then in the first fine throes of the discovery of aniline dyes. And what the feminine, by way of compensation for so much else in her expected behaviour, demanded of a colour was brilliance, not discretion. - John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1969

Ordinary women always console themselves. Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means they have a history. - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

In a continuing effort at precision repoting, a New York Times reporter covering the O. J. Simpson trial found himself at a loss in describing the colour of defence lawyer Johnnie Cochran's double-breasted suit. He dipatched a research assistant to a local drugstore to purchase a box of Crayola crayons, from which he selected the closest possible colour: periwinkle. In an informal poll, courthouse wags opted for the less precise purple. During a courtroom break, though, Cochran insisted his suit was blue. 'Just don't call it mauve,' he said. - USA Today, February 1995

The tyrrany of mauve is over! That's the word from Vivian Kistler, a member of the Color Marketing Group, an organization that helps decide which colors we wear and decorate our homes in. There's no doubt that mauve is now dead as a fashion color, Kistler said. Even firms that manufacture rubber and plastic kitchen products such as dish drainers are phasing out their mauve lines. 'In the last six or severn years we have been mauved to death,' Kistler said, laughing. - The St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the 12th annual New York ArtExpo art dealers' trade show, 1990

Like William Perkin I personally aspire / to metamorphose lower into higher. / His transforming coal-tar into brilliant dyes / has come for me of late to symbolize / chemistry at its most profound and true / creating radiance out of basest residue. / It is infinitely satisfying / to see what was black dreck serve the art of dyeing. // Those are the powers and forces that are needed / if the Western World is not to be superseded. / William Perkin's ingenious transformation / could have benefited the British nation / But unfortunately Britain still relies / on Germany for all synthetic dyes. / The coal tars of the Ruhr and Rhine / metamorphosed in industrial bulk into aniline. / If more of us in Britain had done work in / the process pioneered by William Perkin / we would not now as a nation still have to rely / on Germany for all synthetic dye. // Like many a physical or chemical invention / pioneered by the British I could mention / Perkin's valuable synthetic dyes / which will always, for yours truly, symbolize / the magic of chemistry, Germans monopolize. - Sir Charles Crookes, historian, physicist, spiritualist, and chemist (he trained under Hofmann, discovered the element thallium, and conducted important experiments on cathode rays and radiation), as portrayed in the play Square Rounds by Tony Harrison, first performed at the Naional Theatre in 1992

Colour may be extracted from substances, whether they possess it naturally or by communication, in various ways. We have thus the power to remove it intentionally for a useful purpose, but, on the other hand, it often flies contrary to our wish. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810

He, Mertens, was a young chemist, German and Catholic, and I a young chemist, Italian and Jewish. Potentially two colleagues: in fact we worked in the same factory, but I was inside the barbed wire, and he outside. There were forty thousand of us employed in the Buna Werks at Auschwitz. That the two of us, he an Oberingenieur and I a slave-chemist, ever met is improbable . . . - Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve, 1981

British scientists have created the world's first electronic dictionary of colours, a digital palette containing more than 16 million shades. As a result, colours can now be transmitted electronically and accurately, allowing designers, manufacturers of cosmetics, and fashion workers to exchange images in precisely defined colours for the first time.

The system - developed at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology - has been designated as one of the Government's key industrial projects for the new Millennium and it is already being used by Marks and Spencer and cosmetics manufacturers. You can see what your M&S shirt will look like inside a store, and then out in the street. No more suave mauve creations turning naff pink in daylight. - Robin McKie, Observer, December 1998

I had lunch with Quentin Crisp the week before he died. We met in the Bowery Bar in Manhattan on the Lower East Side for crab cakes and whisky, and for two hours I sat and gazed in wonder at an old man with mauve hair, the self-styled Stately Homo of England. - Gyles Brandreth, Sunday Telegraph, November 1999