In a message dated 10/29/2006 2:54:32 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Also, I remember something about a certain kind of green dye being dangerous. It was used in fabric and wallpaper, and children who ate the paper scraps got sick, also the people wearing a garment could get sick. There was something on this list a while ago about someone having an old dress she wanted to wear, but was told to be careful because of potentially harmful dyes. Certainly some aniline dyes could be toxic while being used. The stories about their danger after dyeing, however, sound very much like what we would today call urban legends. For example, supposedly someone wore mittens dyed with one of the new reddish dyes. The mittens got wet in the snow, the person pulled them off with the teeth, and got sick. Another one of the stories was about how people boiled potatoes in a pot that had been used for dyeing. Why I question the veracity of these stories is I found the same stories re-printed about 10 years later, and with just vague details--some of the hallmarks of "urban legends." The wallpaper, though, is a little different. Arsenic was used in green pigments (not dyes). Pigments need a fixative to attach to paper and fabric, and it is not too farfetched to think they could flake off and be harmful. Again, the contemporary literature has stories of such things, but they are impossible to verify at this late date. The most vivid, so to speak, was about a woman who used green crepe paper (evidently colored with an arsenical pigment), for a costume and got deathly ill. Ann Wass _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
