Original photo by Jeremy Zero/ Unsplash
Today carrots are practically synonymous with the color orange, but their auburn hue is a relatively recent development. When the carrot was first cultivated 5,000 years ago in Central Asia, it was often a bright purple. Soon, two different groups emerged: Asiatic carrots and Western carrots. Eventually, yellow carrots in this Western group (which may have developed as mutants of the purple variety) developed into their recognizable orange color around the 16th century, helped along by the master agricultural traders of the time — the Dutch.
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It's a factCarrots contain a red-orange pigment called beta-carotene. Carotenemia occurs when eating too many beta-carotene-rich foods turns human skin a yellowish orange. If you were to eat 10 carrots a day for weeks, you could develop it — but doctors don’t recommend trying it.
A common myth says the Dutch grew these carrots to honor William of Orange, the founding father of the Dutch Republic, but there’s no evidence of this. What’s more likely is that the Dutch took to the vegetable because it thrived in the country’s mild, wet climate. (Although the orange color may have first appeared naturally, Dutch farmers made it the predominant hue by selectively growing orange roots — scholars say these carrots likely performed more reliably, tasted better, and were less likely to stain than the purple versions.) The modern orange carrot evolved from this period of Dutch cultivation, and soon spread throughout Europe before making its way to the New World. Today, there are more than 40 varieties of carrots of various shapes, sizes, and colors — including several hues of purple.
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Purple is associated with royalty thanks to a rare mollusk.
For most of European history, creating a rich, resilient purple dye was an extremely expensive process. The dye could only be made from the dried mucus glands of murex shellfish found near the ancient Phoenician town of Tyre on the Mediterranean (now part of Lebanon). Making just one gram of this pigment, known as Tyrian purple, required nearly 9,000 of these mollusks, so only the very wealthy — emperors and royals — could afford to use the color. In ancient Rome, purple became associated with the power of the emperor, and the idea continued after the empire’s fall. In medieval and Elizabethan England, a series of sumptuary laws ensured that the color purple was reserved only for the most elite members of society “upon payne to forfett the seid apparel.” Luckily, in 1856, chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally created a synthetic purple dye, later called mauve, while trying to synthesize a drug for malaria. Purple’s imperial reign was over.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
