A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire

Natural History, Sept, 2005 by Laurence A. Marschall

A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Butler Greenfield HarperCollins, 2005; $26.95

In the highlands of southern Mexico, near the city of Oaxaca, lives an insect no bigger than a lentil, known to modern biologists as Dactylopius coccus, or, more commonly, the cochineal. The female, which is the more common form of the bug (a female's life span is twice as long as a male's), is a wingless parasite whose ideal of domesticity is to stick her proboscis deep into the flaplike leaf of a prickly pear cactus. There she remains, motionless, sucking nutrients from her host for the rest of her life. Tiny and nondescript, the cochineal would be easy to overlook--except for one remarkable characteristic. Crush one, and your fingers turn as red as arterial blood: the insects are filled with a pigment, which also goes by the name cochineal, that is one of the strongest and most colorfast red dyes ever discovered.

Native peoples of Mexico have used cochineal to color fabrics and feathers for millennia. The earliest conquistadors in the 1500s, who knew only the brownish madders and russets of the Old World, were dazzled by these Aztec reds; nothing back home could match their fiery intensity. Soon galleons were transporting wholesale quantities of the dried bugs to dyers in the great textile centers of Europe. Farmed, harvested, and dried by natives on small family plots, cochineal insects helped color the silks and wools of Hapsburg royalty and, not incidentally, brought the glitter of wealth to a growing merchant class. As trade with the New World increased, cochineal became the standard dye for a wide variety of uses, from the red coats of British soldiers, to the red tints of artists' paints and the coloring of pastry icings. By 1850, millions of pounds of cochineal--the equivalent of hundreds of billions of insect carcasses--were traveling across the Atlantic each year.

For centuries Spain enjoyed a monopoly on the source. Cochineal husbandry is a tricky business. The little bugs were hard to establish anywhere except in their native habitat. And Spain so effectively kept outsiders out of its New World colonies that, even into the 1700s, most Europeans did not even know whether the desiccated granules marketed as cochineal were originally plants or animals.

Writer Amy Butler Greenfield, who comes from a family of dyers, has mined the rich history of cochineal for wonderful stories about the biology of insects, the sociology of fashion, and the economics of colomalism. Among her more memorable characters is Nicolas-Joseph Thiery de Menonville, a French lawyer and naturalist, whose personal mission was to steal the secret of cochineal from Spain.

Thiery masqueraded as a physician, and through an elaborate series of ruses managed to enter Mexico, trek to Oaxaca (whose location he did not even know when he set out), and spirit away several chests of insect-infested cactus leaves from under the noses of customs authorities. In September 1777 he arrived in French-controlled Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), where he set up a garden to cultivate the delicate creatures for his homeland. Thiery died before he could establish an economically viable industry, but later biopirates eventually managed to break the Spanish monopoly.

By that time, however, synthetic dyes, developed in the late 1800s, were putting an end to the dominance of cochineal. Thanks to the wonders of chemistry, it became possible not only to re-create cochineal's active agent, carminic acid, but also to create hues never seen before in nature. Cochineal is still produced in a few places to meet the demands of the natural food and fiber market, but it no longer has the power to color the destinies of great nations.