Door 7 – Wrapping up for Christmas!

There are a variety of natural materials that can be used to make red dyes, including lichen, henna and madder. Madder, made from the dye plant Rubia tinctorum, has been used as a dye as far back as 1500 BC – it was even found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Madder was also used to make Alizarin, the compound 1,2-dihydroxy-9,10-anthracenedione. Alizarin was a prominent red dye until synthetic Alizarin was successfully duplicated in 1869 when German chemists Carl Graebe and Carl Liebermann found a way to produce alizarin from anthracene. A later discovery that anthracene could be abstracted from coal tar further advanced the importance and affordability of alizarin as a synthetic dye. This reduced cost caused the market for madder to collapse almost overnight. While alizarin has been largely replaced by more light-resistant pigmens it is still used in some printing.  (QI – it is also used in classrooms as a stain to indicate the calcium carbonate minerals, calcite and aragonite!)

Other more exotic inks and pigments used in wrapping paper such as metallic pigments are also made through mined raw materials. To produce metallic pigments, materials such as Aluminium powder (aluminium bronze) and copper-zinc alloy powder (gold bronze) are used to produce novel silver and gold inks!

Our favourite geology inspired wrapping paper!

Now you’ve had some background into how wrapping paper is made, why not theme your Christmas presents with some geological wrapping paper? Here are some of our favourites!

Mineralogy paper, Cavillini & Co