Which color is not present on the flags of the world?

Источник

At this moment there are 197 sovereign states, and each country has its own unique flag. But there is an interesting detail — there is a color that does not exist on any of the flags. This color is purple.

The reason

The reason for such color discrimination is very simple. Until the end of the XIX century peoples has a difficulty with extraction of the purple dye for cloth. It existed only in the form of a pigment extracted from marine mollusks of the family Muricidae.

Источник

Purple dye was very limited, and the extraction process was so long and expensive that the production of just one kilogram of purple pigment needed to process more than 10,000 molluscs. Therefore, in those days purple clothes were a luxury.

Closer to the beginning of the twentieth century the situation is changing. The сhemist William Perkin chemically synthesized the precious purple dye, thus he save millions of mollusks from death.

Around the same period started mass production of purple fabrics, but the vast majority of countries already decided on the colors of their flags and, of course, purple and remained without attention.

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