Making history’s most expensive (and bloody) red. | Carmine Red

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]This is the most expensive red in history. At the height of its popularity, it was worth more than its weight in gold and dyed the robes of the pope, the coats of British soldiers, and appeared in masterpieces from artists like Vermeere, Caravagio, and Van Gogh.

[00:00:15]For centuries, it was one of the most beloved reds in the entire world. And then as a paint, it essentially vanished. Today, you can't find tubes of genuine carmine red paint anywhere. They just don't make it anymore. And the reason why is actually a little complicated. Partly because this pigment was made from something rather unusual.

[00:00:38]Blood. Insect blood to be precise. This tiny vial of genuine carmine pigment is around 140 years old, dating back to the Victorian era. And today we're making it into a paint. Let's get into it, shall we? But first, PPE. Personal protective equipment. not PP like people thought I said in my last video. The reason I am going through precautions here is because technically while carmine itself isn't considered toxic, this pigment is also around 140 years old and the 1800s weren't exactly known for having rigorous safety regulations or quality control. So, we have no idea if it might have small amounts of contaminants like lead or analign dyes or other toxic goodies that would be rather dangerous to inhale. But now that we are safely covered, let's get to paint making. This little bottle of Carmine Red dates back to around the year 1880 and came from an art shop called CW Keenan's Artist Materials on 447 Fulton Street in Brooklyn, New York. An address that is now a raising canes. Inside the bottle, there is a powdery substance that has a gorgeous vivid reddish hue. And if you look really closely, you can see that that powder has some interesting color variation going on on the surface of the pigment in the glass tube. This is me giving you ominous foreshadowing about something strange and tragic that we will get to later in the video. You may also notice that the label says burnt carmine. That's because this is a slightly darker, richer shade of carmine that was apparently really great for shading and glazing in paintings, especially for adding a sense of depth and warmth to things like flesh tones.

[00:02:15]Pretty ironic, honestly, considering what the paint is made of. The flesh and blood of thousands upon thousands of sacrificed mothers and their tiny babies. Happy late Mother's Day, by the way, to moms everywhere. I hope that you're having a great day and also that you are not violently crushed and made into pain. Carmine red comes from insect blood or more accurately hemolymph. Meet the coachil. Despite the common urban myth about red dye coming from beetle blood, these aren't beetles. They're tiny parasitic scale insects. And while the males are super teenytiny and zip around on little wings, female coachals spend almost their entire lives attached to prickly pear cactus pads, feeding and barely moving at all, covered in a waxy coating that protects them from the sun's harsh rays. And because they're basically stationary little fruit snacks, tiny Turkish delights covered in powdered sugar, they evolved a potent chemical weapon, carminic acid. Carminic acid tastes terrible, is toxic to many insects that prey on the coacheneals, and in females, especially ones close to laying eggs, it can make up nearly a quarter of their entire body weight.

[00:03:26]It's stored in their hemolymph, which like I said is like the bug equivalent of blood except it doesn't have actual blood cells and it doesn't transport oxygen. It's a long story. Better explanation right here. But it's the carminic acid that is in that hemolymph that gives these insects their famous red color. So, these tiny insects spend their lives as little living fruit gushers filled with poisonous crimson goo. And ironically, this poison goo they developed to protect themselves would eventually become their own downfall. This is another coachal insect, but this one is dead and dried.

[00:04:02]Because starting over 2,000 years ago in Meso America, people started scraping thousands upon thousands of these little guys off of the cactus leaves, drying them out, and making them into red dyes that were so unique and beautiful that they can only be described as hypnotic, which is exactly what we're about to do right after a quick sponsor.

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[00:05:53]And now, back to the video. Thanks, guys. You were so helpful. Now, to make this Carmine Red into paint, we first need to get into the bottle itself.

[00:06:02]Don't worry about me breaking into a historic bottle. I have three of them. I promise I would not be doing this if I only had one. And the reason why I wouldn't usually be doing this is because unfortunately the cork has become pushed down into and tightly fused to the neck of the bottle. Which means there's only one thing to do in this case. We got to break her out. So once we've removed all of that cork, we just need to sift it using a fine sifter to get out all of the tiny little cork pieces and then carefully transfer it to the mulling plate. Then I'm just going to use a little pipette to add some walnut oil. Mix it up a little bit with one of my pallet knives to get it going.

[00:06:38]And then we can pull out my handy dandy paint muller and get to mulling, which unfortunately takes about a bajillion years. It actually takes around an hour.

[00:06:47]It just it feels like such a long time.

[00:06:49]It's such a crazy workout. And while I mold that paint, let's talk a little bit about the history of Carmine Red and how this paint pigment was made. Because it's not as simple as just taking the bugs and squishing them and painting with them. In the 1600s, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, two major religious Christian orders at the time, recorded that they had taught the indigenous people of Central America how to cultivate and harvest coachal insects and turn them into dye and pigments.

[00:07:19]This was, of course, absolute nonsense.

[00:07:22]Coachal was actually first used as a pigment in ancient Meso America around 200 to 700 BCE and says the Harvard Museum of Science and Culture. Its red was symbolic of the gods sun and blood and employed in rituals of the Maya and Aztec peoples who traded it throughout Central and South America. Indigenous people in the Mexican regions of Puebla, Tlakcala, and Wajaka had systems for breeding and engineering coachal insects for ideal traits to produce red paint pigments for coloring manuscripts and murals and to dye cloth and feathers.

[00:07:56]Following the Spanish invasion, it was traded around the world and its production became an industry that relied entirely on the expertise and labor of indigenous Mexicans, though they were never acknowledged for it. and traded it was to a rather extreme level especially by Spain which by the 16th to 19th centuries it became globally dominant as a red pigment and also it was Spain's second most valuable new world export after literal silver. It was worth around half of its weight in silver 18 shillings per pound which today is somewhere around $200 to $400 per pound. Please don't check my math on that. Speaking of per pound, it took 70,000 insects to produce just one pound of coachal dye. And if that's true, why the heck did they make it? And why did they need so much? Let me count a couple coachal insects and see if we can visualize a little bit of that for you.

[00:08:54]So, this is what about 100 coachal insects look like. If you just take this and you multiply it by 700, you get one pound of dye. So, like, how the heck did they make coachal? And why did they need so so many insects to make it? Well, let me introduce you to the process of making coach anal dye because it's still done today. It's not made into a paint at all, but it is still made into a dye.

[00:09:18]See, bugs are on the leaves or pads of prickly pear cactuses. Often they are cultivated like this on coachal farms.

[00:09:26]These bugs are then scraped off of the plant and usually killed through letting them dry out in the sun or occasionally through like steaming them or boiling them. The insect bodies are then boiled with a solution that contains Wait a second. I think I have this in my house.

[00:09:43]This ammonia or sometimes sodium carbonate mixed with water and then they strain out all the little buggy bodies.

[00:09:50]Those are discarded and then the very very very bright red water is then treated with something called aloom and made into something called a lake pigment. They add something into that lake dye like a chalk to make that red pigment separate from the water. Also, a quick note about bug cruelty. I felt really horrible researching this video because I don't like killing bugs. I think they're really sweet and cute and I don't like it. And so I made a Reddit post in r/entomology to see what other bug enthusiasts and bug experts thought about the subject of killing bugs and how like humane drying bugs out in the sun is because that sounded like a not great way to go to me. And there was a great comment. It's from Mr. 24601.

[00:10:43]Reminder that almost no wild insects die peacefully from old age. Almost all are eaten alive. The remainder die of parasites or disease. So almost any way you kill a wild insect is more humane than the alternative. If you feel compassion for insects sounds like this is not a horrible way to go. So that's comforting to me. Now back to coachil as a commodity. When the Spanish concisadors brought coachil back to Europe, it kind of exploded because no one had ever seen a red that vivid before. They called it grana coachia.

[00:11:15]The English chemist Robert Bole described it as a perfect scarlet while another master dyer.

[00:11:25]I don't know why that's funny to me. It should not be funny. It's not funny.

[00:11:28]While another master dyer called it the finest and best dye drug in the world.

[00:11:34]I'm not hooked on drugs. I'm hooked on bugs. That was terrible.

[00:11:40]Before long, Coach Neil became Europe's top source of red dye, and Spain made an absolute fortune exporting it across the entire globe. In her book about Coach Neil, called the perfect red, award-winning historian Amy Butler Greenfield explains, "As far as Europe was concerned, the only trouble with Coacheneal was that Spain controlled the supply, guarding its monopoly so jealously that the dy stuff's very nature remained a mystery. Was coachil animal, vegetable, or mineral? The best minds in Europe argued the point for more than two centuries. Few, however, disputed the new dy stuff's value. In an age where textiles were a major source of wealth, coachil was big business.

[00:12:18]Kings, habeddashers, scientists, pirates, and spies all became caught up in the chase for the most desirable color on Earth. To obtain it, men sacked ships, turned spy, and courted death.

[00:12:31]Yeah, it was insanely priced. Like I said, it was used to dye the robes of the Pope back when the Pope had red robes all the time. It was also used to dye his cute little mantle that he wears now, although it isn't anymore. It was used to dye the red coats of the British army. And quite possibly, it was used to dye the first ever American flag, which was said to be dyed with indigo for the blue and either matter root or coachal for the red. In addition to being used as a dye, it was also used by many artists as a paint. But because it was expensive, it was used extremely sparingly, often in important commissions, in specific garments like a super red robe or to like liven up facial features. For instance, in Vermeier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, it's Coach Neil that we see as the reddish color on the girl's lips. Coach Neil or Carmine or Carmine Lake was also one of Vincent Van Go's favorite colors on his palette to the extent that he wrote to his brother Theo and described it as the red of wine and is warm and lively like wine. I could be crazy, but I kind of feel like Vincent Van Go may have liked wine.

[00:13:39]I should not I should not make fun of Van Go. Now, at this point, you also might be thinking red. Is Van Go known for having a lot of red in his paintings? It doesn't seem like it. In fact, a lot of them are more like blue, green, and yellow. And this, my friends, is where we insert more ominous foreshadowing. We'll get to talking a little bit about that in a bit. But first, we are done with our beautiful paint mulling. So, let's swatch a little bit of this carmine red. I was honestly really impressed with how rich and vibrant this red turned out. If you see it in person, it really does look like blood. But if you mix it with a little bit of a white, it immediately cools into this really, really beautiful almost magenta color, kind of like quinacridon red or alysarin crimson for any of my painters out there. And naturally, I didn't want to just swatch this paint. I did want to use it to make an entire painting just to see how it would behave because it's not made anymore. So, I decided to paint a little section of Vermeier's Girl with a Pearl Earring. But focus on the focal point of this image as far as Carmine is concerned, the lips. And while I paint that, let me tell you a little bit about the problem with Coachal and why it wasn't used very much after Vincent Van Go in the 1890s. It all has to do with lightfastness. Coacheneal is something called a fugitive pigment, which means it disappears. It's kind of a ghost.

[00:15:07]When carmine red is exposed to direct sunlight and oxygen, it can fade in a matter of years or with watercolor a matter of months or even weeks. And we see this in paintings, especially by Van Gogh in his rooms like this painting of a bedroom and in this portrait of his mother, which have both faded to be a lot more green without the carmine that used to be there. This might make it sound like I'm really stupid for doing a painting in carmine, but I actually don't agree for a couple of reasons.

[00:15:38]With this painting, I am coating it in a special protective varnish against UV light and then also putting it behind a special UV blocking museum grade glass.

[00:15:47]That should make it last a lot longer, hopefully, you know, 30 to 50 years. But there's no way to know for sure. I don't know. In some ways, I think that's why it's so beautiful. It is a pigment that is inherently ephemeral. If you would like to make an offer on this painting to support the channel and the work that I'm doing here, as well as to own possibly the only piece of art in the past hundred years that was painted entirely with Carmine paint, a paint that is now extinct, reach out to me. I would love to have your support and it really, really helps the channel. And although it hasn't really been used much in any other paintings for the past hundred years, there are still a lot of other things that coachil is used in every single day. Carmine red is still used as a food dye and super widely in cosmetics. Its many names include carmine, coachal extract, natural red 4 E120, CI75470, crimson lake, and carminic acid. You might have heard about this a little bit already because of what I'll call the great Starbucks scandal of 2012 where Starbucks caught a lot of angry comments, especially from vegans who were upset when they discovered that Carmine was being used in the infamous Starbucks pink drink >> and has a beautiful pink hue courtesy of crushed insects.

[00:17:08]>> Because of the backlash from people about unknowingly eating insects, Starbucks apologized and has since switched to lycopine, a tomato-based extract. And during this time in 2012, it started coming out that Carmine was in a bunch of stuff that people weren't aware of.

[00:17:26]>> Starbucks officials also point out products like juices made by other companies have the same insect extract in them.

[00:17:32]>> Some companies switch dyes. Some like Yopplay tried to defend themselves by saying something like, "We understand your concerns and you're not eating groundup insects. It's sourced from the dried shells of the coachal beetle used in a purified form. safe, natural, and has the FDA's approval for use in food, which is fascinating because it's kind of wrong. First off, it's not a beetle.

[00:17:56]Second of it, it doesn't really come from the dried shells. It comes from the entire body. And like, it is okay. We are consuming something that came from insects. Can we just get over that a little bit? Insects are eaten as a valuable source of protein all over the world. And frankly, I don't feel like it makes a lot of sense to be like so grossed out by one source of food and not buy another. Anyway, I don't know.

[00:18:24]Semantics. Carmine also isn't as popular anymore in food products because people cited allergies as a popular issue. But that is interesting because as a girly who has a ton of allergies, Carmine was tested as being a potential allergen.

[00:18:39]But so was Red 40. And red 40, which is a petroleum derived dye, has a bunch more potential issues than carmine does.

[00:18:48]And yet, when you pick up any processed red food or drink, there's like an 80% chance that it has red 40 in it. In comparison, carmine has been used for literally thousands of years with very little issue. Bugs are low carbon footprint when it comes to farming practices and are insanely useful for a ton of things and used for a ton of things, including food. So, in closing, carmine is super interesting. For thousands of years, it was used as both a dye and a paint, and then it got super popular as a paint, and then it stopped being popular as a paint because people realized that it faded really quickly.

[00:19:25]But I think that's kind of a shame because it's such a beautiful color that even if it may not last beyond our lifetime, I think it's still really cool. So, what did you think about coachil and carmine red? Is it ethical?

[00:19:39]Is it the best color red to ever exist like some people claim it is? I would love to know your thoughts in the comments down below. Also, feel free to subscribe if you enjoyed this video. And if you liked learning about carmine and want to check out another video about another messoamerican color, feel free to check out my video about Maya blue and how it was used in human sacrifices.

[00:20:01]So super interesting. In closing, thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much to Rosetta Stone Sapphire for sponsoring this video and thank you to my patrons for helping keep this channel up and running and possible in this crazy world that we live in. Once again, if you would like to inquire about purchasing this painting, please let me know. And until next time, I hope you have a great day. Don't die. And I'll see you in the next video. Bye. Okay.

[00:20:27]Well, what do you think?

[00:20:30]Oh, you're so good.