The price of blue.

Ground from lapis lazuli mined in the Sar-e-Sang valley of Afghanistan and carried overland to Europe, true ultramarine was at times priced above gold. Renaissance patrons wrote it into contracts by name — reserving the finest blue for the Virgin's robes was a display of budget as much as devotion.

Synthetic ultramarine, developed in the 1820s in pursuit of a prize, ended the monopoly. The color that had signaled wealth became, in a generation, just another tube of paint.

In 1856, eighteen-year-old chemistry student William Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine, the antimalarial, and failed — into a beaker of purple. Mauveine became the first commercial synthetic dye.

Within a decade coal-tar chemistry had made colors that had belonged to royalty into things anyone could wear, and founded the modern chemical industry. A failed drug turned out to be a color, and the color turned out to be an industry.

Made from the secretions of murex sea snails — commonly cited at thousands of snails for a single gram — Tyrian purple was the purple of Roman emperors, worth its weight in precious metal.

Its scarcity is why “royal purple” still sounds natural today: the phrase outlived the snails by two thousand years.

In 1960 the artist Yves Klein registered his matte ultramarine formulation — the binder, not the pigment, was the secret — via a French Soleau envelope. IKB became the rare color with an artist's name on it.

It is the same lapis blue from the first panel, four centuries on: no longer scarce, but claimed.

Early graphics cards showed 256 colors at once, and system software reserved 40; the remaining 216 formed a 6×6×6 cube every browser could count on. That is why 1990s sites all seemed to share one palette — and why hex steps of 00/33/66/99/CC/FF feel oddly canonical to this day.

The palettes on this site descend from a freedom the web only won later. When you build a gradient from any hex you like, you're spending a color budget these five never had.