magenta

Magenta is that colour that sits somewhere between red and purple. It’s also one of the four inks in your printer (showing my age there) that the colour cartridge uses. But where does the word ‘magenta’ come from? Well, it turns out it has quite the bloody backstory.

Magenta is a town in Lombardy in northern Italy. It’s also the site of the Battle of Magenta. This was a key moment in the Second Italian War of Independence which took place in 1859, when the French and Sardinians fought the Austrians. Not sure where the Italians were*. Around the same time, lots of chemists were in fierce competition to develop new synthetic dyes. In 1859, the same year as the battle, French chemist François-Emmanuel Verguin created a vibrant reddish-purple dye from coal tar derivatives. Originally called ‘fuchsine’ (after the fuchsia flower), it was soon rebranded as ‘magenta’, probably because the colour was reminiscent of the bloodshed at the battle.

Before synthetic dyes like magenta, rich red and purple hues were difficult and expensive to produce. They were often made from crushed insects (like cochineal) or rare plants. The invention of magenta dye changed this, making vivid colours more accessible for clothing, art and industry. PHEW.

Magenta isn’t a real colour in the way that red or blue are. That’s because it doesn’t have its own wavelength of light. Instead, our brains create magenta when we see both red and blue light at the same time, basically filling in the gap in the spectrum where green would normally be. Weird, right? This reminds of the mindblowing (or noseblowing) fact that our brains filter our noses out of our vision, as otherwise they’d get in our way.

* I did some Wikipedia searching and here’s a quick history lesson – Italy wasn’t unified at the time, and lots of Italian states didn’t take part in this war. The one that did, Piedmont-Sardinia, knew it couldn’t win on its own, so it teamed up with France (the cost was that they had to hand over Nice and Savoy to Napoleon III). And because much of northern Italy was under Austrian rule, it was essentially a war between Austria and France (there were lots of Italian nationalist volunteers in it too though). The battle of Magenta was a decisive victory for the Franco-Sardinian alliance.

This is the linear visible spectrum – look, no magenta!

macaroni

Now, you might think you know what I’m talking about here – pasta, right? Wrong. Penguins? No, not them either. Allow me to take you back to the 18th century. If you were a macaroni, then you were likely the most flamboyant and extravagantly dressed man in the room (which was no small feat in an era of powdered wigs and embroidered everything).

A macaroni was the 18th-century equivalent of a fashion influencer – but with more lace, bigger wigs and a worrying obsession with teeny-tiny hats. The term referred to young men who’d been on the Grand Tour, a kind of aristocratic gap year where wealthy Brits swanned around Europe pretending to appreciate Renaissance art. Italy was a popular destination for these men and many developed a taste for maccaroni (okay, so it is pasta-related) which was little known in Britain at the time. When they returned to London draped in silk, covered in frills and with wigs so tall they made walking through doorways a logistical nightmare, they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club – not an actual club, but a subculture of worldliness, superior style, sophistication and enlightenment. They would even refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as ‘very maccaroni’.

It wasn’t all fun and games and tiddly hats though. Macaronis came to be seen in stereotyped negative terms in Britain, and as symbols of inappropriate effeminacy and bourgeois excess – satirical prints of the time show them mincing around in ludicrous outfits, clutching canes and sporting expressions of supreme self-satisfaction. And with the aristos over the Channel in France losing their heads, this type of extravagant dressing began to fall out of favour at the end of the 18th century when a more restrained aesthetic took over. Don’t worry though – although the French Revolution definitely put a dampener on the most OTT aristocratic styles, dandyism (led by figures like Beau Brummell) emerged soon after. And while it was a little more understated, it still embraced a meticulous approach to fashion. No small hats though, sadly.

The most famous reference to macaronis is probably in the nursery rhyme Yankee Doodle, where the American hero ‘stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni’. Written by a Brit, the joke was that the Yankees were so naïve that they believed a feather in the hat was enough to turn them into a sophisticated European macaroni.

But what about the penguin, I hear you ask? Well, the macaroni penguin sports a very fetching yellow crest. They were named by English sailors who came across them in the Falkland Islands in the early 19th century, and thought they bore a spooky resemblance to our macaroni fashionistas.

chimera

A chimera (pronounced ky-MEER-uh or kih-MEER-uh, depending on who you ask) is something made up of different parts. The original Chimera (with a big C) was a fire-breathing creature n Greek mythology with the head of a lion, the head of a goat on its back and a serpent for a tail. The name comes from ‘khimaira’ (Χίμαιρα) which means ‘she-goat’.

There’s also a mountain in southern Turkey named after the chimera. Mount Chimaera (or Yanartaş) is a rocky hillside where natural gas seeps from cracks in the earth, creating flickering fires that burn night and day. With lions, goats and snakes roaming the surrounding hills, it’s easy to see how it came to be named after a hybrid beast that spat flames.

Chimeras aren’t just mythological. Don’t worry though, you’re not going to run into a fire-breathing goat mix on your next package holiday. We’re talking science here – specifically, genetics. A chimera is an organism made up of cells from two different sources, something that can happen naturally or in a lab. Humans and animals can be chimeras when two fertilised eggs fuse into a single embryo, which means they end up with two sets of DNA. This can go completely unnoticed or reveal itself in surprising ways, like different coloured eyes or patches of skin with different pigmentation.

One famous example of a human chimera is an American woman called Karen Keegan. In 2002, she needed a kidney transplant and used genetic testing to find a donor in her family. But the tests showed that genetically she couldn’t be the mother of her sons. The mystery was solved when doctors discovered that Keegan was a chimera – the DNA in her blood cells was different to that in the other tissues in her body. That’s because when her mother was pregnant with her, two separate eggs had been fertilised, creating two separate balls of cells each with its own DNA. At some point, these two groups of cells fused into one, and Karen was born with cells from both balls randomly distributed throughout her body. I’m pleased they figured that out – it could have led to some super awkward questions otherwise.

Chimeras are also a godsend for crime writers – I’ve definitely seen them used in more than one drama when DNA evidence at a crime scene was discredited because the suspected perp was actually a chimera.

This is Venus the Two-Faced Cat, an American tortoiseshell cat whose face is half black and half red tabby. Opinions differ as to whether she’s a true chimera or her markings are simply a matter of luck and heterochromia (two different coloured eyes). Whatever the real answer, she looks awesome. (And you can of course follow her on Instagram.)