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A Deadly Dye

In the late 1700s, a Swedish chemist invented a pigment called “Scheele’s Green.” In Victorian times, the color was known as “Paris Green.”

“Paris Green” was such a popular color in Victorian England that it was used for everything. Women papered the walls of their homes with Paris Green Wallpaper, servants lit Paris Green candles, girls adorned their barren shoulders with fake flowers dyed green with Paris Green dye, and society ladies danced the nights away in Paris Green ball gowns. Gowns like the green one Lady Grey is planning on wearing to Mary’s ball.

The color’s popularity stemmed largely from changes in lighting. Gaslight was rapidly replacing candlelight and oil lamps, and the ladies loved how their green dresses (and walls and flowers and shoes and hats and anything else that could be dyed green) shimmered and glowed in the soft light. 

There was only one teensy tiny problem. Paris Green was using toxic amounts of a  readily available poison: arsenic trioxide, also known as “white arsenic.”

This fact was quite well known. In the late 1800’s, the British Medical Journal wrote that “the arsenic-wearing woman ‘carries in her skirts poison enough to slay the whole of the admirers she may meet with in half a dozen ball-rooms.’” 

Today, it is believed by fashion historians that one arsenic laced dress could easily have contained enough arsenic to kill 20 people. Talk about your literal femme fatale.

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Previously: A Fashionable Death: A brief history of gowns, gloves and arsenic – Part II