30 May 2025 / 10 House
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Find out moreHow did they make colourful costumes?
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Jesse: How did the aztecs color their colorful atuendos [costumes]? (Answered by Julia Flood/Mexicolore)
The Aztecs had some incredible ways of creating the vibrant colours they used to dye their clothes. They also used pigments for paintings, murals, and to cover sculptures. Here’s a small list of some of the materials and processes they used:-
• Colour: RED
Material: nocheztli (Cochineal) (pic 1)
Process: Cochineal are small red insects that feed on the juice of tender prickly pear cactus leaves. The Aztecs scraped them off the leaf, dried and crushed them. Adding water to cochineal powder resulted in a bright red liquid. Cochineal is still used nowadays!
• Colour: YELLOW
Material: xochipalli
Process: This is described as a yellow flower that grows in hot climates. It was probably dried and crushed to produce dye.
• Colour: YELLOW WITH A REDDISH HUE
Material: zacatlaxcalli (cuscuta tinctoria or torta herbácea) (pic 2)
Process: A type of creeper that hangs from trees, especially the Pirú. Also probably crushed.
• Colour: BLACK
Material: uitzcuáhuitl
Process: This is a tree bark that was soaked repeatedly to produce a brackish black colour. This colour is not deep and was not considered to be very fine.
• Colour: BLUE
Material: matlalli (‘blue’)
Process: Matlalli was made from crushed blue flowers.
• Colour: LIGHT BLUE
Material: texotli
Process: A flower which was crushed to produce dye for huipiles (blouses).
• Colour: VERMILLION
Material: chíotl
Process: This is a flower that, when ground and mixed with axin (the yellow ointment produced from a tree insect of the same name), produced a strong vermillion dye.
• Ink
Material: nacazcólotl (pic 4)
Process: An inedible fruit that produced good ink for writing.
Picture sources:-
• Pic 1: image from the Cochineal Treatise ©Trustees of the British Museum
• Pic 2 (main) & pic 4: images from the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994
• Pic 2 (inset): © R. Pontón
• Pic 3: Photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore.
Comments (4)
Cliodna
8th Sep 2020
Did the aztecs use any green dyes at all? And if not, then why? Was it a lack of suitable plants/technologies for making said dyes or was plant-green just not fashionable?
Mexicolore
Good question. Yes they did! We’ve tried to answer this in full in our ‘Aztec Life’ section, here:-
https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/aztec-life/how-scribes-produced-the-colour-green
maddie
26th May 2018
is there anymore informacion on color dye of the aztec
Jordan
21st Dec 2016
Hey, is there any more dye made out of bugs?
-Sincerely, Jordan
Jesse Calderon
29th Oct 2013
thanks for the important information
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