hi welcome back to part three of the world's rarest colors
if you're new here first of all hi welcome glad you're here and let me catch you up
throughout history there have been many paint colors that have been lost to time colors that we
in the modern day including myself have never even seen or heard of before and as you're about to see
there's a few reasons for these colors fading out to be fair it's mostly arsenic but there's many
reasons for example maybe the paint was made with incredibly impossible to get ingredients maybe it
was incredibly toxic to humans or maybe as you're about to see they might have been explosives and
some of these colors do still technically exist today but because they're created with synthetic
lab created pigments we're never truly going to see the true authentic color of the ingredients
that it was originally made with and so because of all those reasons they have been lost to history
and it's quite sad really that we in the modern day are never going to see those colors ever again
um until today in 2019 i happen to stumble across an artist ebay seller and not only does
he deeply study these paints but he actually gets the ingredients from these super crazy
rare paints uh like for example there's that picture of him literally working
with arsenic to recreate one of the colors to say he's dedicated is an understatement
and once he makes these rare precious paints and gets the colors of them he actually recreates them
synthetically color matches to an absolute t of the original version and makes them available and
safe for us artists in the modern day to use at this point in time he has a whole entire line of
historical colors that you can buy all of which i have done a video on and shared their history
and recently he's came out with five more which i have gladly purchased they finally
came in the mail yesterday so all i can say is sit down buckle up get ready we're about
to see colors that neither you or i have ever seen before well i'm assuming you've never seen
some of these colors before maybe you've killed somebody with arsenic before i don't know your
life but i'm gonna assume that a mass majority of you have never seen some of these colors
okay i'm trying to make this look really aesthetic with like the palm leaves but i feel like it's
just kind of getting in the way just know i tried just know i tried all right so the first color
that we have here is called realgar now this color is very special because before the 20th
century before we had synthetic orange realgar was the only way to get a vibrant pure orange in
your paintings and throughout history you'll see this color a lot it's such a gorgeous orange color
but the problem with realgar is that it's made from a highly toxic substance called arsenic
now as i've talked about many times throughout this video series arsenic is a
very highly toxic chemical if you somehow manage to get this inside of your body
it'll basically stop your cardiovascular system and all your major organs will go into
failure and not just that but throughout history realgar was actually used as an explosive
and most disturbing of all realgar is so toxic that it actually removes hair from your skin
and even in modern day you can still find tutorials on how to use realgar to get rid of hair
but luckily we don't have to worry about that because i have the synthetic version here today
wow it's absolutely stunning to be quite honest with you it's kind of like a perfect
pumpkin orange if that makes sense it's a little bit richer it's a little bit darker than a normal
orange but it's still absolutely beautiful let's see what it looks like thinned out
oh wow it's so pretty it has a very natural color to it it doesn't look like very like
bam in your face kind of orange like a neon orange it just looks like a perfect natural orange now as
always i'm going to compare this color with colors that i have in my collection starting with orange
now right off the bat it just looks synthetic compared to the realgar it kind of looks like a
kid color like a bright nickelodeon kind of orange now i have this watercolor in the color flesh tint
this is orange yellow by arteza oh yeah this one kind of looks like it and lastly
let's try out this marker this is orange by ohuhu i don't know i just thought i'd try it
out
again you know what i'm gonna say it's missing like that almost brown earthy tone that we get
from the realgar i can see why this was such a special color anything that's natural in orange
i would say this realgar would be beautiful to paint with you know it's just absolutely beautiful
now for this next color i would say it's probably the least problematic of all the
colors that i'm going to show you today this one i'm very very excited to see
especially because of its colorful history no pun intended now unlike the other paints that
we're working with today this one is actually a lab-created chemical
from the start in 1907 a chemist basically mixed a bunch of chemicals with magnesium
he heated them up to a pretty high temperature and he got manganese blue now the reason i say this-
now originally this color wasn't actually very popular with the artist
out there strangely enough this color was very popular in construction they
would basically use this color to mix in with cement to get blue cement for swimming pools
so at this point you're probably wondering well if it's so wholesome and nice what the
heck happened to it and the answer to that my friend is that the real manganese blue was banned
and it was banned for three reasons the first reason being that it just got too expensive
it got too expensive to constantly have to mine everything involved in making this paint
especially in the 1970s when there was all kinds of other synthetic blues that were deeper and
better quality than this one the second reason is that there might be some potential that this
could be a carcinogen from what i can see during research i don't think it's ever actually killed
anybody or directly led to death and the main reason this paint was banned was actually an
environmental concern in the 1970s people started noticing that anywhere that you had manganese blue
the surrounding crops the water system around it plants all of that would be dead or very messed up
and throughout the 90s the rest of the world just slowly faded it out of existence now in modern day
surprisingly enough there is actually a dupe for it and this is the synthetic version but i really
had to hunt for it and right off the bat they kind of just look like different colors like they don't
look the same at all oh wait why is this a pencil oh god this isn't a paintbrush this is a blending-
i'm such an idiot this is an eraser and this side you brush away the eraser particle with
i thought it was a paintbrush and it's too late now because i have the paint on it so here we go
wow this color is intense imagine a shade of teal that royalty would
wear that's exactly what this looks like it's beautiful can you imagine this for
landscapes hair color like the possibilities of this color is endless wow it's so pretty
it is a little hard to thin out i will say that but i don't mind it's so pretty and so vibrant
i really hope the camera can do it justice because i don't want it to look just like a
pure blue on camera like this color has so much green and yellow in it it's absolutely brilliant
oh yeah right off the bat you can definitely tell that this one's
drastically different oh it's so blue
this is a beautiful color i'm not gonna lie it's really really beautiful but
it just doesn't have like that same depth and realness that the other one does
which is a pattern that i've seen a lot throughout this video series i don't have anything else to
say besides it looks blue like it just looks like a normal blue color you know it looks like a color
that i've seen many times before in fact to me i think it's gonna look a lot like phthalo blue
this one has a lot more violet in it it doesn't have a lot of yellow and green
like the original manganese blue not to be shady but to be shady
i would say that the phthalo blue looks more closer to the original than the actual synthetic
manganese blue does and you know what just for the heck of it i actually have a colbat teal
here with me and i want to show you guys how close manganese blue looks to a teal color
and what i'm about to show you is ultramarine blue mixed with teal out of all the colors
that i think i've ever reviewed for this video series i feel like manganese blue
is probably going to be one of the hardest colors to try to dupe
all right for this next color it just makes me sad like this color is just absolutely so depressing
this color is actually still widely available on the market today except of course synthetic
versions i personally have seen this color like the synthetic version many many many times i
actually own quite a few of them but i personally have never seen the true version of this so let's
check it out and this color of course is if i could ever get it open the the artist name who
makes this is ryan and honestly i'm going to give him like 5 000 points for making this so
well packaged this color is called ivory black now if you're not aware ivory comes from a few places
all of which being animals this includes narwhals elk walrus and of course elephants and rhinoceros
and at this point you're probably wondering how is this paint black if ivory is white and that
is a good question back in the day not only did they crush up the ivory to get the paint but they
would also get the burnt bones of the animals crush it up and make ivory black so yeah ivory
in general was very very popular back in the day so let's test this bad boy out and see what's up
wow this is incredibly dark on camera it probably looks pure
black and i can tell you first hand in real life it looks just pure black let
me try thinning it out a lot a lot and we'll see if there's any change
you can see it's really a true neutral black it kind of reminds me of like a newspaper that's
the exact color of what it looks like now as far as like looking for dupes similarities i have a
few colors that i want to test out first one being also ivory black from winsor and newton
oh my god they're very similar oh my gosh wow actually you know what this
one's a little less intense and it has a little bit more yellow to it
watch let me thin it out and you can see like it's a little bit more yellow
i don't know if you can tell literally at all on camera
but uh yeah this one's a little bit more yellow this one's a little bit more neutral
next i'll try out mars black see if there's any difference there
mars black is a very intense pure black as you can see now that they're drying they look very
very similar but if i had to pick the two i would probably go with ryan's just because as
you can see it's a little bit easier to thin out but i gotta say they're very similar and
i gotta hand it to ryan he like nailed the exact color that's pretty incredible
all right so i saved the most dramatic one for last uh this paint is absolutely nuts and at first
when i ordered on ebay i got so excited i was like oh cinnabar like cinnabar island from pokemon you
know where red goes and he explores and there's cinnabar everywhere and their music plays
well after i learned the history of cinnabar my childhood is ruined now unlike every single
pigment that i've showed on this video series cinnabar throughout history has
been incredibly easy to get it's easy to find it's easy to make the pigment and it makes one
of the best red pigments known to man and so throughout history it was all over the place
and it wasn't until centuries later we learned that cinnabar is highly toxic
but it's not just like normal toxic no no no cinnabar contains extreme levels of mercury
and unlike the other paints that will pretty much get you immediately that's not the case
with mercury back in the day mercury could be easily eaten it could be easily breathed in
and mercury would start building up in your body and you would never know and these symptoms they
start off very gradually very slowly and over a slow period you end up getting sicker and sicker
until you experience kidney failure brain failure and you end up in a coma and of
course it was the ancient time so there was no remedy and of course that led to death
so yeah my childhood of red at cinnabar island having a good time getting fire pokemon
yeah no that would have literally killed him what i was reading i can't even imagine how many people
died from mercury poisoning just because it was so widely available because it was so
versatile you could put it in so many different things it's absolutely crazy to think about
but again this is the synthetic version so let's go ahead and test this bad boy out
oh my gosh it's beautiful whoa it's so pretty not to be dramatic but to be dramatic this is
literally one of the most beautiful shades of red that i have ever had the pleasure of witnessing
this one also has that beautiful like naturally dusk muted earthy tone to it compared to
synthetic colors this is very toned down but compared to earthy colors this is very extra
now according to wikipedia another name for cinnabar is also vermilion
and as a lot of you may or may not know vermilion is still a very poppin color
so yeah let's see if this synthetic color is anywhere near the original version
okay okay this is an absolute perfect example of what i mean when i say the colors have been
lost to time they do look very similar but the synthetic one is nice but it's a little
bit more brighter it's a little bit more orange and it's lacking the shade range of the original
and even though these two are the exact same colors if i had to pick i would go
for the one that has a little bit more depth to it
and just to be a little extra let's see what like a true red color looks like compared to
vermilion you see how bright and vibrant this color is compared to the other two that is really
really interesting if i want to be honest here it kind of looks like the color of red kool-aid
uh in my opinion it doesn't look as i guess sophisticated as the other two so that's
that's kind of interesting now as beautiful and perfect as these colors are
on their own i really want to see what they look like in a painting so i'm gonna paint now
well there you have it guys part three to the rarest colors in existence
if you want to purchase any of these i will gladly leave ryan's ebay store down below
as well as the whole entire rare paint playlist and also my socials and second
channel thank you guys so much again for watching i will see you guys next video bye