> "I find it fascinating to know what previous generations thought was safe, and then we learn, oh, actually, that might not have been a great idea to use these brilliant dyes," Weinstein-Webb says.
Yep. William Morris was a divil for this, and refused to acknowledge the dangers well past when they were known.
I wonder though - in terms of human potential and lives lost, do all of those examples put together come anywhere near what we're doing today with PFAS, microplastics, agricultural & industrial runoff, neonicotinoids, etc.?
It's easy to point fingers now and laugh at the Victorians smearing lead pain on their face, or the folks taking radioactive suppositories for health... Fun too. But like... We're in the most glassy house imaginable.
We know better, like Morris, but we're still letting people away with this stuff (and even imprisoning the activists fighting it). Takes a lot of the fun out of it :/
The thing too is that we know better, but we still use those toxic substances because the people who are profiting off it aren't the ones suffering ill effects.
Well, at least the petrochemical people flooding the world with microplastics also have it in their bodies.
The comparison between historical hazards like toxic dyes and modern environmental issues is a gooood one! The evolution of our understanding of risk and safety.
I've been learning to use makeup recently and I've been surprised at how common it is to do things that I would instinctively avoid. (I realize this is probably all extremely pedestrian for people who grew up wearing makeup, but it was surprising to me).
For example, it's fairly common to use eyeliner on the "waterline" of your eye where it will wash off into your eye over time. You need to reapply lipstick periodically; partially because some of it ends up getting washed off and swallowed. A lot of these eye and lip makeups contain (cosmetic grade) glitter. A lot of makeup is in the form of sticky sprays or powders that presumably get partially inhaled.
I don't mean this as some sort of hysterical "makeup is a conspiracy to kill us!!1!1" sort of thing. I know that it goes through extensive testing and is probably mostly safe. However, I do wonder if some of these might eventually be found to be less safe then we originally thought.
I've worn makeup a few times... What amazed me is how gross it feels.
It might be the ADD or whatever, but I really detest the feeling of being caked in grease. I've often wondered what kind of damage its doing to people's skin to block gas exchange, clog pores, soak in weird chemicals, etc.
Gotta say though, it never occurred to me how much goop is going in people's eye holes, or how much lipstick they're ingesting. The inhalation I've thought about a lot... It's not easy to get shit out of your lungs once it goes in there. High hopes for earth-friendly (and lung friendly) glitter to become more of a thing.
All that said - I get it. We're incredibly shallow, generally, and I've seen in myself and others the difference a little makeup can make in how you're treated.
Buying good (not killing you or damaging your skin) cosmetics and using them properly is an art, as I've observed watching my wife.
To be honest, the best really is to just use retinol creams? and take care of your diet. This way you can get away using hardly any make up. Bonus is that you don't need to wash it off afterwards.
But beauty treatments and knowledge is expensive, that's why poorer or less informed people have to make do with make up. Don't quote me on this, but usually the most advertised brands are also the ones that are most toxic (just repeating what I've learned from my wife).
> the most advertised brands are also the ones that are most toxic
I truly believe this is true of just about everything.
The harder they have to advertise it, the more likely it's actually really fucking bad for us.
What gets advertised the most - sugary snacks, pharmaceuticals, huckster lawyers, insurance, pesticide laden cereal and grain products, bitcoin, fossil fuel, fast food, mortgages, gambling sites, cigarettes (in countries where that's still legal)... Where's the ads for organic carrots, or watermelon?
Something that I've noticed, that I wonder if it could be an useful (although very blunt force) heuristic for thinking about chemicals:
Chemicals with strong effects (e.g. bright colors, the ability to permanently set dye, powerful adhesives and epoxies, breathable waterproofing, etc.) often achieve their effect via strong chemical reactions. Strong chemical reactions have a good chance of being able to interact with your body's chemical reactions and make you sick. Therefore, you should default to handling chemicals with strong effects with caution (e.g. wearing gloves and a respirator if there are fumes).
Of course this is just a rule of thumb. Fruit juice is brightly colored but generally doesn't require special handling. Mineral sunscreen works via physical rather than chemical properties. Etc.
Fruit juice also doesn’t retain its color over long periods of time. Good dyes in general are hard to make safely, and we use a lot of dyes in our society.
Ya, I'm definitely speaking in VERY broad strokes here because this isn't my area of expertise! I was just meaning that in comparison to what's called "chemical sunscreen" which, according to my admittedly limited understanding, works by undergoing a chemical reaction when exposed to UV.
Definitely! I use this rule of thumb when I'm crafting to know that I need to wear gloves while dying something, using adhesives, industrial cleaners, etc. After it's set you only need to be careful in as much as you need to prevent bleeding colors onto other clothes.
It didn't seem to be mentioned in the article, but have these covers always been unsafe to handle, or has the problem got worse as the books get older and maybe the chemicals are more likely to leech out or be released as dust etc?
If they've always been toxic, I'm kind of surprised that it wasn't noticed at the time. And presumably, there was a point when we stopped using these dyes. Was that because we knew the risks they posed, in which case why did we lose that knowledge, or was it just that we switched to cheaper processes that just happened to be safer?
It is unclear to me how prevalent those fears were. The device was invented sure, someone had this fear or someone thought someone did, but how common was that really.
Well we don't know If microplastics are really bad. Let's just assume they are mildly toxic. Since the high amount of children on earth it will still be millions seriously affected.
Well, start with BPAs. Then add PFOAs (ie goretex, jackets are cca pure plastic). Micro/nano plastics themselves are still unknown, but those first two have already caused some significant damage. How do you count rate of cancer X raised by some tiny % Y on hundreds of millions of kids, billions if counting longer timescales since plastics were old news even in 80s?
If you think eating plastics is fine, feel free to start chewing some of it daily, of course lowest quality and price.
and keep firing coal plants[0] even though more people in the US die from lung cancer, by far, than any other cancer (2.5x breast cancer, 5x leukemia, etc.; it also has a higher mortality rate than most other cancers[1]
More tobacco, but the share of non-smokers with lung cancer has been increasing lately (probably because less people smoke). Estimated 10-20%. "“If lung cancer in never-smokers were a separate entity, it would be in the top 10 cancers in the U.S.” for both incidence and mortality."[0]
Many pigments past and present a pretty toxic and always have been unsafe to handle. Of course it is also worse when old materials degrade and start shedding into the environment to be picked up or breathed in by people.
>presumably, there was a point when we stopped using these dyes
The discovery of toxicity and phasing out depends on the individual chemical, not really all at once.
In the past, it was often quite widely known how toxic these things were and they were used anyway.
Paris green was used as a rat poison, insecticide, and a pigment all at the same time, factory workers were often poisoned with it.
Today we are really paranoid about these kinds of things, sometimes maybe a little too much, but the comfort levels with known dangers in the past was surprisingly high.
Eh, different scales of toxicity. "Might give you cancer after years of exposure" is different from "you won't survive until tomorrow". Like people were straight up using this green pigment as rat poison.
copper acetoarsenite is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green and is deadly, but still used by artists as a pigment today (though it's no longer used for things like wallpaper, clothing, and rat poison)
lead oxide is a mild concern; it's sweet, and back when it was the most common white pigment for painting houses, kids would chew on it. at that time there was a massive subclinical lead poisoning outbreak that probably resulted in an unprecedented decades-long crime wave in the usa, but that was probably more due to leaded gasoline than the paint. and the amount that can potentially flake off a book is even smaller than what kids got chewing on paint chips
but lead chromate is basically nontoxic under any normal exposure conditions. it's something you don't want to eat, though people commonly use it as a food dye; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_chromate says:
> Despite containing both lead and hexavalent chromium, lead chromate is not acutely lethal because of its very low solubility. The LD50 for rats is only 5,000 mg/kg. Lead chromate must be treated with great care in its manufacture, the main concerns being dust of the chromate precursor. (...) It is used (illegally) to enhance the color of certain spices, particularly turmeric,[8][9] particularly in Bangladesh. (...) Unlike other lead-based paint pigments, lead chromate is still widely used, especially in road marking paint.
if you tried to murder someone with lead chromate and lead sulfide, you would fail. they would probably be unharmed
now, it's also possible the lead is in some other form that's more dangerous. and it's not clear that you'd put lead sulfide in a book on purpose; it's black, but carbon is cheaper, and making carbon black is both safer and easier. so maybe the excess lead is in some form that's of real concern. but the compounds they've identified are harmless, except for the green menace we already knew about
phys.org and the acs should be ashamed of having printed this baseless fearmongering
Death, magic, alchemy, transmutation, poison (and so perhaps by extension, radiation) are all associated with fluorescent green to some degree. (Do a Google image search for "necromancy" or "poisonous dragon" and the majority colour is fluorescent green.) This might be partly influenced by the arsenic greens of the Victorian era.
Radiation would perhaps be better pictured with a light blue glow (Cherenkov radiation).
The green glow used in pop culture has its origin in the widespread use of radium paint to achieve a glow-in-the-dark effect (e.g. on watch faces) in the early 20th century. I still own a radium watch. The paint was always fluorescent green. And it did glow.
I thought this was something new, but it’s Vienna Green still out there causing mayhem every time we forget about Vienna Green. Which they don’t even mention, they just call it copper acetoarsenite. Nobody is going to call a Victorian book or wallpaper “copper acetoarsenite” they’re gonna call it what it is, which is Vienna Green.
68 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadhttps://kloster-eberbach.de/
Who even has a name: Jean-Jacques Annaud.
Arsenic green: https://sites.udel.edu/poisonbookproject/arsenic-bookbinding...
Lead chromate yellow: https://sites.udel.edu/poisonbookproject/chrome-yellow-bookc...
Yep. William Morris was a divil for this, and refused to acknowledge the dangers well past when they were known.
I wonder though - in terms of human potential and lives lost, do all of those examples put together come anywhere near what we're doing today with PFAS, microplastics, agricultural & industrial runoff, neonicotinoids, etc.?
It's easy to point fingers now and laugh at the Victorians smearing lead pain on their face, or the folks taking radioactive suppositories for health... Fun too. But like... We're in the most glassy house imaginable.
We know better, like Morris, but we're still letting people away with this stuff (and even imprisoning the activists fighting it). Takes a lot of the fun out of it :/
Well, at least the petrochemical people flooding the world with microplastics also have it in their bodies.
Hate to smudge your consolation, but the tech is probably there for them to filter their blood now, or it will be soon. [0]
Course, it will be far too expensive for poor people.
Still! At least the microplastics in their brains will be harder to clean! [1]
... Seriously, these people need stopping. They're never going to stop on their own.
0 - https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8929/3/3/28
1 - https://www.smh.com.au/national/human-brain-tissue-made-up-o...
holy shit 1/200 molecules in your fucking brain is straight up plastic jesus christ
crickets
For example, it's fairly common to use eyeliner on the "waterline" of your eye where it will wash off into your eye over time. You need to reapply lipstick periodically; partially because some of it ends up getting washed off and swallowed. A lot of these eye and lip makeups contain (cosmetic grade) glitter. A lot of makeup is in the form of sticky sprays or powders that presumably get partially inhaled.
I don't mean this as some sort of hysterical "makeup is a conspiracy to kill us!!1!1" sort of thing. I know that it goes through extensive testing and is probably mostly safe. However, I do wonder if some of these might eventually be found to be less safe then we originally thought.
It might be the ADD or whatever, but I really detest the feeling of being caked in grease. I've often wondered what kind of damage its doing to people's skin to block gas exchange, clog pores, soak in weird chemicals, etc.
Gotta say though, it never occurred to me how much goop is going in people's eye holes, or how much lipstick they're ingesting. The inhalation I've thought about a lot... It's not easy to get shit out of your lungs once it goes in there. High hopes for earth-friendly (and lung friendly) glitter to become more of a thing.
All that said - I get it. We're incredibly shallow, generally, and I've seen in myself and others the difference a little makeup can make in how you're treated.
To be honest, the best really is to just use retinol creams? and take care of your diet. This way you can get away using hardly any make up. Bonus is that you don't need to wash it off afterwards.
But beauty treatments and knowledge is expensive, that's why poorer or less informed people have to make do with make up. Don't quote me on this, but usually the most advertised brands are also the ones that are most toxic (just repeating what I've learned from my wife).
I truly believe this is true of just about everything.
The harder they have to advertise it, the more likely it's actually really fucking bad for us.
What gets advertised the most - sugary snacks, pharmaceuticals, huckster lawyers, insurance, pesticide laden cereal and grain products, bitcoin, fossil fuel, fast food, mortgages, gambling sites, cigarettes (in countries where that's still legal)... Where's the ads for organic carrots, or watermelon?
Chemicals with strong effects (e.g. bright colors, the ability to permanently set dye, powerful adhesives and epoxies, breathable waterproofing, etc.) often achieve their effect via strong chemical reactions. Strong chemical reactions have a good chance of being able to interact with your body's chemical reactions and make you sick. Therefore, you should default to handling chemicals with strong effects with caution (e.g. wearing gloves and a respirator if there are fumes).
Of course this is just a rule of thumb. Fruit juice is brightly colored but generally doesn't require special handling. Mineral sunscreen works via physical rather than chemical properties. Etc.
The field of physical chemistry is going to blow your mind.
If they've always been toxic, I'm kind of surprised that it wasn't noticed at the time. And presumably, there was a point when we stopped using these dyes. Was that because we knew the risks they posed, in which case why did we lose that knowledge, or was it just that we switched to cheaper processes that just happened to be safer?
Sometimes things are weird like that. Like how lead was put in petrol even when the toxicity of lead was known.
If you want a modern take on it observe our obsession with stranger danger for children while we happily fill them up with plastic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin
They're in the Mariana Trench, and Everest, and the rain.
And production is still rising.
0 - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/23/health/plastics-in-brain-...
If you think eating plastics is fine, feel free to start chewing some of it daily, of course lowest quality and price.
[0] https://synapse.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/201fc98c0d74... [1] https://www.cancer.gov/types/common-cancers
[0] https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/26/growing-share-of-lung-ca...
They say the lungs of people with fireplaces look similar to those of smokers.
>presumably, there was a point when we stopped using these dyes
The discovery of toxicity and phasing out depends on the individual chemical, not really all at once.
In the past, it was often quite widely known how toxic these things were and they were used anyway.
Paris green was used as a rat poison, insecticide, and a pigment all at the same time, factory workers were often poisoned with it.
Today we are really paranoid about these kinds of things, sometimes maybe a little too much, but the comfort levels with known dangers in the past was surprisingly high.
copper acetoarsenite is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green and is deadly, but still used by artists as a pigment today (though it's no longer used for things like wallpaper, clothing, and rat poison)
lead oxide is a mild concern; it's sweet, and back when it was the most common white pigment for painting houses, kids would chew on it. at that time there was a massive subclinical lead poisoning outbreak that probably resulted in an unprecedented decades-long crime wave in the usa, but that was probably more due to leaded gasoline than the paint. and the amount that can potentially flake off a book is even smaller than what kids got chewing on paint chips
but lead chromate is basically nontoxic under any normal exposure conditions. it's something you don't want to eat, though people commonly use it as a food dye; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_chromate says:
> Despite containing both lead and hexavalent chromium, lead chromate is not acutely lethal because of its very low solubility. The LD50 for rats is only 5,000 mg/kg. Lead chromate must be treated with great care in its manufacture, the main concerns being dust of the chromate precursor. (...) It is used (illegally) to enhance the color of certain spices, particularly turmeric,[8][9] particularly in Bangladesh. (...) Unlike other lead-based paint pigments, lead chromate is still widely used, especially in road marking paint.
and lead sulfide is pretty much completely nontoxic. there's no way to get lead poisoning from it. that's why egg whites are an antidote to lead poisoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_sulfide#Safety
if you tried to murder someone with lead chromate and lead sulfide, you would fail. they would probably be unharmed
now, it's also possible the lead is in some other form that's more dangerous. and it's not clear that you'd put lead sulfide in a book on purpose; it's black, but carbon is cheaper, and making carbon black is both safer and easier. so maybe the excess lead is in some form that's of real concern. but the compounds they've identified are harmless, except for the green menace we already knew about
phys.org and the acs should be ashamed of having printed this baseless fearmongering
The green glow used in pop culture has its origin in the widespread use of radium paint to achieve a glow-in-the-dark effect (e.g. on watch faces) in the early 20th century. I still own a radium watch. The paint was always fluorescent green. And it did glow.
If you want a sane version, get modern tritium-based glowing capsules.
"Monkeys do not laugh. Laughter is particular to men"