Alchemical dye creation

  "Alchemical made dyes are often toxic. Pregnant women and small children should not wear garments made with alchemically created dyes. For that matter, I would recommend everyone avoid alchemical dyed clothing. It's not worth endangering your health for fashion."   -Beslyfle, matron of the Fumayan Tenders and part-time physician and midwife

by Me with Hero Forge

-Lloyd the Physician

 

"I have a lot of good friends who are alchemists, and they grumble about how the tales of the dangers of alchemical dyes are greatly exaggerated.   The process used to create alchemical dyes does produce toxic fumes...like almost every alchemical process. But the dangers of alchemical dyes are greatly exaggerated. You shouldn't huff the fumes outside an alchemist's lab, or make a stew out of dyed garments, but wearing alchemical dyes won't cause any real harm.

  'Natural' doesn't always mean 'safe'. Most of Scarterra's deadliest poisons come out of nature, and most dyes are technically poisonous if someone were to foolish enough to drink them or inhale the fumes of their creation."

by Eron12 with Hero Forge

-Bevan, Swynfaredian Alchemist

 

"There isn't one formula for making alchemical clothing, there is one formula for every color. Every shade and permutation of every color has it's own formula, painstakingly discovered one at a time by dedicated alchemists refining their craft over the millennia, passing their formulas down from master to apprentice."   Whether by quirk of fate or the machinations of the Nine, it just so happens that colors and shades that are hard to make without alchemy are also hard to make with alchemy.

Purple cloth is very expensive and time consuming to make 'naturally', and it is also the most difficult and time consuming color to synthetize in an alchemist's lab.   The second hardest colors to make are orange and green which are also fairly expensive to make naturally. The easiest color for an alchemist to make is brown and that's also the cheapest natural dye to purchase.   I haven't been asked to make blue dye since my apprenticeship ended. Indigo dye is locally available in large quantities, so it's cheaper to buy indigo-based blue dyes than to buy alchemist manufactured blue dyes. But orange dyes have to imported from far away, so I get called on to make orange dye all the time.   I don't know where natural orange dye comes from, but I assume in that foreign land, there's an alchemist being asked to make blue dye because someone doesn't want to import it from us."