History of Color and COSMO® 500 Colors
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The Day Humanity Took Hold of “Color”—and On to COSMO®’s 500 Colors
The Oldest Colors of Humanity, Left in Caves
In the Lascaux caves of southwestern France, hundreds of wall paintings said to have been made by Cro-Magnon people about 20,000 years ago remain. Animals such as horses, aurochs, and deer are vividly painted in red, black, yellow, and brown pigments. More recent research has also confirmed paintings said to be about 64,000 years old in places such as La Pasiega Cave in Spain, suggesting that the origins of expression using color may reach even further back.
Pigments of that time were made by crushing ochre, hematite (a red mineral containing iron oxide), manganese oxide, charcoal, and the like into powder, then dissolving them in water, animal fat, or tree sap. Colored earth became red or yellow; burned wood became black; burned bone became white—an era when the natural materials around people were themselves the source of color.
What is interesting is that there was a bias in the colors used. Green pigments should have been plentiful, yet there is almost no evidence they were used in cave paintings. Why choose that color, and why not choose another? Much mystery still remains in the “sense of color” of humans tens of thousands of years ago.
The Beginning of Dyeing Culture
If pigment is the technology of “placing color on the surface of things,” dye is the technology of “soaking color into the fiber itself.” This history of dyeing is also ancient: it is known that rich techniques of color expression were already established around 3000 BCE in China and around 1450 BCE in Egypt.
Chemical dyes were born only in the 19th century; for the thousands of years before that, humanity kept extracting color from plants, minerals, insects, and other things found in nature. For example, a precious purple dye known as Tyrian purple, taken from Mediterranean shellfish, was once a special color that only a very few people of power could wear.
Color was not mere decoration; it also indicated status, faith, and communal identity. To obtain a single color, people traveled far and spent precious resources.
The Freedom to “Choose a Favorite Color”—Not as Obvious as It Seems
Here, let us pause and think.
Creating color long required enormous effort: mining minerals, boiling plants, gathering shells and insects. The colors available were also heavily shaped by the natural environment of the land where people lived. Being able to freely choose “as much of the color you want as you want” is, in the tens of thousands of years of human history, something that happened only very recently.
Seen that way, the fact that we can freely pick “this color” from among hundreds of options when choosing embroidery thread today is by no means something to take for granted.
COSMO®’s 500 Colors Stand in the Line of Humanity’s History of Color
The lineup of more than 500 colors that COSMO® embroidery thread is proud of is not merely about having a large number. It is a culmination of color expression that recreates even subtle gradients and the delicate hues found in nature.
When you think, “I want this color,” the answer is always waiting on the COSMO thread shelf. That also means that we now stand at the far end of a history in which humanity once traveled in search of minerals and plants and used its ingenuity to obtain color.
The casual moment of picking up a needle and choosing a thread. There, the story of humanity and color that has continued for tens of thousands of years is truly still alive.