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Concept
Synthetic colorant
Summary
A colorant is any substance that changes the spectral transmittance or reflectance of a material. Synthetic colorants are those created in a laboratory or industrial setting. The production and improvement of colorants was a driver of the early synthetic chemical industry, in fact many of today's largest chemical producers started as dye-works in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, including Bayer AG(1863). Synthetics are extremely attractive for industrial and aesthetic purposes as they have they often achieve higher intensity and color fastness than comparable natural pigments and dyes used since ancient times. Market viable large scale production of dyes occurred nearly simultaneously in the early major producing countries Britain (1857), France (1858), Germany (1858), and Switzerland (1859), and expansion of associated chemical industries followed. The mid-nineteenth century through WWII saw an incredible expansion of the variety and scale of manufacture of synthetic colorants. Synthetic colorants quickly became ubiquitous in everyday life, from clothing to food. This stems from the invention of industrial research and development laboratories in the 1870s, and the new awareness of empirical chemical formulas as targets for synthesis by academic chemists. The dye industry became one of the first instances where directed scientific research lead to new products, and the first where this occurred regularly.
Colorants can be divided into pigments and dyes. Broadly, dyes are soluble and become fixed to a substrate via impregnation, while pigments are insoluble and require a binding agent to adhere to a substrate. Dyes, therefore, must have an affinity for the substance they are intended to color. Chemically speaking, pigments can be organic or inorganic, while dyes are only organic. Furthermore, organic white pigments do not exist, despite the fact that the majority of purified crystalline organic products are white in appearance. This story is complicated somewhat by lake pigments, or lakes, which are dyes modified with a chemical process to form an insoluble pigment.
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