Color Drenching sounds like a very now idea — and TikTok would have you believe it was invented in 2023 — but the impulse is centuries old. Here we have put together a potted history of color drenching, along with some suggestions for how you can liven up your space – and live within it for longer than one season.

From ancient Egypt, where artisans fused copper and sand into a brilliant blue used to color the tombs of pharaohs, to renaissance Europe's ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli and reserved for the robes of the Virgin Mary, blue was once a mark of luxury.

From ancient China, where ground cinnabar colored the lacquered thrones and ceremonial vessels of the imperial court, to Renaissance Europe's cochineal, a crimson dye pressed from Mexican insects and reserved for the robes of cardinals, red was the sign of prestige.

From prehistoric cave walls at Lascaux, painted with raw umber dug straight from the earth, to Victorian-era mummy brown ground from the wrappings of Egyptian mummies, brown is humanity's most literal color.

From the court of eighteenth-century France, where Madame de Pompadour lent her name to a soft rose hue favored on Sèvres porcelain, to 1950s America, where blush-pink bathrooms and kitchens became a symbol of postwar optimism, pink has moved from aristocratic refinement to everyday cheer.

From ancient India, where the white-clad Jain monks and nuns adopted simple white robes as a mark of purity and renunciation, to Elizabeth I's Tudor court, where ceruse, a lead-based white powder, became the mark of aristocratic beauty despite slowly poisoning its wearers, white has carried both sanctity and vanity through time.

From ancient Phoenicia, where thousands of crushed murex sea snails yielded a single ounce of Tyrian purple, a dye so costly only emperors could wear it, to 1856 England, where eighteen-year-old chemist William Perkin accidentally invented mauveine and launched the synthetic dye industry

From ancient Egypt, where orpiment, a toxic arsenic mineral, gilded tomb walls with a shimmering gold-yellow, to Mughal India's Indian yellow, pressed from the urine of mango-fed cattle and prized by European painters for its intense luminance and deep gold hue, yellow has long been a color of alchemy and intrigue.

From ancient India, where the earliest Buddhist monks dyed their discarded robes with turmeric, to seventeenth-century Holland, where the color became the emblem of the Royal House of Orange, orange has carried both spiritual and political weight.

From ancient Egypt, where malachite, a ground copper ore, lined the eyes of pharaohs, to Victorian England's Scheele's green, an arsenic-laced dye that colored wallpaper and gowns despite its poison, green has long walked a line between beauty and danger.

From the Neanderthals who over 60,000 years ago ground manganese dioxide into black pigment, to Queen Victoria's forty years of mourning that turned the color into the uniform of an entire era's fashion, black and gray have always ritualized human expression.

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