![]() ![]() The funerary mask of Tutankhamen features lapis lazuli around the eyes and eyebrows. And in the Christian world, the most valuable color was reserved for the most elevated of virgins. The living wore blue too: Cleopatra reportedly wore on her eyelids to a brilliant and sparkling effect a fine dust made of lapis lazuli, which, I imagine, was nothing like the wan powdery-blue eye shadows so popular in the 1980s.) For millennia, blue has been a sacred and costly hue, more valuable even than gold. (Lapis lazuli was used for the inlaid eyebrows and kohl on Tutankhamen’s funeral mask. Egyptians loved this bold cobalt blue and would pulverize lapis lazuli stones and mix the resulting powder with animal fat or vegetable gum to create a thick blue paste, which they used to adorn the dead bodies of royalty. ![]() The earliest stable blue was made from lapis lazuli, the mining of which began in Afghanistan around six thousand years ago. Perhaps this is because blue is the color of the sky, something we can always see but never reach, or perhaps it’s because, as chemist Heinz Berke points out, early humans “had no access to blue because blue is not what you call an earth color … You don’t find it in the soil.” Blue was elusive, and this made it valuable. Whether it’s glacier pale or Mediterranean bright, blue is a color with long-standing mystical associations. ![]() Lazurite, aka lapis lazuli, is mined primarily in Afghanistan. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |