If asked about the source of the bright saffron or deep indigo of a beautiful garment, most of us would instinctively think of the yellow stigmas of the flowers of Crocus sativus or the blue seeds of Indigofera tinctoria, two traditional sources for textile pigments deployed for thousands of years to brighten our wardrobe.  

Naturally, we would think of plants because, for thousands of years, we turned to the living world to color our artistic creations. Powdered leaves of the Lawsonia inermis tree gave us the spectacular range of russet reds we call "henna" (which I use routinely in my hair). Potions derived from the Prunus cerasifera plum tree could yield green, yellow, and orange hues. Even the animal kingdom could serve as a library for our palettes, such as the deep black ink of the cuttlefish Sepia oficianalis—hence the name we give to monochrome photographs, "sepia."  

The living world is ablaze with colors in every shade and hue we can see or imagine—and even some we can't see or imagine, such as ultraviolet light, visible to most insects and birds, and polarised light, discernible by some crustaceans. Why wouldn't we sample from this ready-made rainbow, already crafted for us by 3.5 billion years of evolution and essentially free to use—off patent, in the public domain, and already available? 

It might then come as a surprise that over 90% of the dyes used in modern textiles are created from fossil fuels—an even larger number than the percentage of textiles made from petrochemicals, estimated at around 60%.  

Though it might seem counterintuitive to spend time and energy chemically tweaking the compounds in oil and gas—which, remember, only come in the clear-white-yellow brown-black spectrum—to produce all the colors that were already found in living creatures, there were numerous reasons the textile industry shifted to chemical dyes after the industrial revolution:  

One, plant-based dyes require enormous volumes of land to produce—detracting from areas available for food; two colors can be reliably produced in consistent volumes and shades rather than varying from batch to batch due to natural variability; three, colors can be produced at any time of year, not being reliant on harvests and seasons; and four—most appealing to designers—petrochemicals could be modified to produce virtually any color at whim, a drastic departure from days when artists had to make do.  

This has led to an entrenched problem: designers believe they can have any color they wish, anytime they wish. And this will be incredibly difficult to change, says Suzanne Lee of Brooklyn-based startup Biofabricate.   

"The fashion industry is used to a full spectrum of color, where everything is available all year round," she says. "With the right chemistry, we can produce any nuance of color that a designer could wish for—but that is not true for biological colors, and it's going to be a while until we can achieve the same intensities in that full spectrum." 

As many in the field point out: people are accustomed to having to wait years or decades for medical breakthroughs such as vaccines or new cancer treatments, but in the fast-paced fashion industry—by its very nature, reliant on hyperactively changing trends—designers and buyers alike are not accustomed to waiting. Worsening matters are industry-sanctioned norms, such as Pantone's annual "Color of the Year" award. The choice for 2024: Peach, deemed a "call for human connection" by Vogue magazine. Once those shades appear on the catwalk, the fast fashion industry rapidly follows suit, churning out chosen shades at enormous volumes for the lowest cost possible.  

It will not be easy to rise to the challenge of producing so many colors so cheaply or so quickly, says Carole Collet, Professor in Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins at the University of the Arts, London. "We are still learning. We've relied on the petrochemical industry for 100 years for almost everything we do, and we just haven't developed equivalent amounts of green chemistry techniques or bio-based chemical knowledge," says Prof Collet, who investigates new ways to biodesign using sustainable sources such as agricultural waste, reclaimed materials, and synthetic biology. "If we want to move away from toxic textile and dye production systems, this won't happen overnight." 

But it is absolutely crucial to move into a "post-petroleum coloring system" with new "nature positive" solutions that are bio-based, bio-assembled, and bio-engineered, she says. After all, the natural world has been producing an astonishing range of colors—from chameleons to peacocks to orchids - for half a billion years without using toxic heavy metals like lead or arsenic (tragically common in antique paints and pastels) or producing any waste at all. In a circular system, all "waste" is used as a nutrient by another life form. Moreover, biological systems have evolved to operate at maximum efficiency at room temperature—without the need for external sources of energy or heat. 

Take that, AI: As always, we have so much more to learn from biology than Silicon Valley would have us believe.  

Biological Libraries  

But we are quickly losing those biological repositories of knowledge, notes Prof Collet: the most recent Living Planet Report released by the World Wildlife Foundation with the Zoological Society of London concluded that 73% of the world's wildlife has vanished in the past 50 years. Rainforests, coral reefs, and all the Technicolor biomes that took billions of years to evolve are transforming daily into scorched savannahs and bleached coral cemeteries. We are losing these libraries of biological information at the same time as we are destroying them.  

This is why Prof Collet founded the Living Systems Lab Research Group in 2013 at Central Saint Martins. "I wanted to really understand how we could design new systems that are not linear and destructive, but circular, complex, dynamic and interrelated like living systems," she says. "In the natural world, if you disrupt one species, you disrupt the entire ecosystem. All core concepts like this should be taught to our students so they understand all the impacts of their work."  

One of those students is Ruth Lloyd, currently completing her PhD under Prof Collet at CSM to develop "an alternative biological color framework for microbial textile screen printing."  Don't know what a "color framework" is? I didn't either. Dyes produce different shades depending on the textile material or manufacturing environment. Think of photographic films we used prior to the digital era, such as sepia or the Instagram filters named after them today. Tweaking the base factors yields a different rainbow of results. 

CSM was an obvious choice, she says, being the only art college in the UK with a Grow Lab, a Containment Level 1 laboratory where art students can learn the principles of biology alongside standard lessons in technique, history, and theory.  

Lloyd agrees that all design students need to understand basic ecological and biological concepts—but it goes deeper than that, she says.  

"In this new bio-design environment, the role of a designer has changed: we now work in environments that are predominately populated with engineers and scientists," she elaborates. "The role of a 'designer' has changed - you can't just be a creator, you also have to be an engineer, a scientist, an innovator, and an entrepreneur."  

A huge challenge? Perhaps not. "At the end of the day, a lot of what scientists and engineers do is really just problem-solving—and actually, a lot of what we call 'design' is really just problem-solving," says Lloyd.  

Why choose such a tricky field for a doctorate? "I just love color and textiles. I think it is something that brings a lot of joy to life." True. The Buddha may have quipped that "life is suffering," but human creativity and innovation clearly show that it doesn't have to be.  

"Poisoned to Death" 

Lloyd's PhD was partially funded by UK start-up Colorifix—cited by every academic and entrepreneur as an industry leader. Since 2014, they have worked to engineer microbes to produce environmentally benign colorants to displace incumbent petrochemical-based dyes.  

It was not, however, the "joy" that color brings to life that inspired Colorifix's Chief Science Officer, Jim Ajioka, to join this field. It was the suffering that Ajioka—also a senior lecturer in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge—witnessed in Nepal, Bangladesh, and India.  

When rivers and streams become contaminated with deadly pathogens, people turn to groundwater. "But all the aquifers in this region are laden with arsenic," he sighs. "So instead of dying quickly from a diarrheal disease or a pathogen, people are just slowly poisoned to death." 

In Nepal, he encountered countless people with cognitive impairment, horrific lesions, or missing fingers and toes from chronic arsenicosis. Further travels in Bangladesh and India, where "the textile industry just dumps their waste into the river," strengthened his conviction that there had to be a better way to produce dyes.  

"The problem is that I had to learn that there is no such thing as a 'green premium,'" he says. Meaning: consumers are rarely keen to pay extra for an "eco-friendly" or "fairtrade" product. "Nobody really cares, unfortunately - it just comes down to money," he says. "So you have to look at the incumbent competitors in the chemical dying industry and see if you can beat them - if you can't, it will be an uphill battle." 

However, thanks to the inherent e2iciency of microbes—again, which have evolved over 3.5 billion years to operate at maximum e2iciency at ambient temperatures—Colorfix's techniques can reduce water consumption by 77%, electricity usage by 53%, and CO2 emissions by 31%. And it's incredibly safe by comparison: Colorifix claims that conventional dying processes use up to 70 different "highly toxic" chemicals—30 of which are "irretrievable," such as mercury, lead, and formaldehyde. Colorifix's method uses only one "renewable and non-toxic" additive.  

So good so far? Maybe. As Ajioka points out: It all comes down to the bottom line. Critically, Colorifix's dyes are designed to work in existing machinery as "drop-in replacements" - unlike many bio-designed innovations that require novel presses and stencils. This spares manufacturers the burdensome costs of new equipment, and makes the switch to bio-fashioned dyes effortless as well as ethical.  

Possibly more appealing to designers, who tend to think of environmentally friendly alternatives as inherently inferior (think frumpy hemp or unsavory vegan "cheese"), is the fact that some of Colorifix's new dyes are aesthetically superior to conventional ones. Ajioka claims the first textile dye they are bringing to market—a yellow pigment they call "Solar Glow"—is brighter than any chemical dye, more vivid than almost anything you've seen in real life.  

"It's so bright it almost hurts your eyes," he laughs. 

Better With Age 

Over in the Netherlands, designer Ilfa Siebenhaar has also found that using bacteria to produce pigments can produce colors that are superior—not inferior—to chemical dyes.  

"Our most successful color so far is violet—it attaches very well to textiles, and it is very stable," she says.  

Highly relevant. In centuries past, violet tones were some of the most difficult and costly to acquire—hence the link between royalty and purple robes.  

Siebenhaar says she has created other new shades with microbes, such as a sharp pink. Many bacterial dyes, however, are more sensitive to UV light than petrochemical-based dyes and will fade more quickly than consumers may be used to. This, however, she says, could present an opportunity to "think differently" about how our clothes change over time. Rather than throwing our clothes away when trends shift, perhaps we might want something that changes over time, like a fine wine? 

As a child of the 90s, it is blindingly obvious to me that we need look no further than the classic and coveted "acid wash" denim jeans of the grunge era as a prime example of clothes that get better with time. 

Jeans are seldom (if ever) dyed anything but dark indigo blue to start with and fade over years with wear and tear. Thus, pale blue jeans were rapidly embraced by the grunge generation as a visual display of anti-consumerist sentiment ("I can't be bothered to buy a new pair, these are fine"). But when consumers actually wanted pale blue jeans on demand—and were willing to pay a premium for it (a pale blue pair of Gucci jeans can set you back $1,300)—factories in Central America and Asia rose to the challenge. They quickly figured out how to deploy industrial machinery, including sandblasters, plus toxic chemicals such as the bleach potassium permanganate (perhaps the inspiration for the title of Nirvana's debut 1989 album, Bleach). Extensive water pollution, lung infections, and worse were the inevitable results.  

Our appetite for high-end and artificially faded jeans has not dimmed. Today, it's estimated that humans purchase three billion pairs of jeans every year, 99% of which are dyed with petrochemical indigo—one of the first dyes to be synthesized, created by chemical godfather Adolf von Bayer in 1867. That is one enormous and entrenched "incumbent industry" to disrupt.  

"It requires a huge amount of time, talent, and money to disrupt this industry - even 

producing one gram of dye at the start of your industrial development can take years and a few million Euros of investment," says Jeremie Blache, CEO of Pili, a "carbon-conscious color company." As a nod to the wisdom of microbes, they take their name "Pili" from the pilus (plural, pili), extensions on the surfaces of bacterial cell membranes used to communicate.  

Pili, however, has succeeded in producing a bacterial indigo dye they say matches chemical dyes in performance. Plus, theirs can be used in existing equipment as "drop-in" alternatives, just as Colorifix achieved. Their process significantly reduces the use of toxic chemicals (such as formaldehyde and cyanide) and fossil resources, while aiming to cut CO2 emissions by up to 50% compared to conventional indigo production. In fact, their initial target was not water wastage but reducing greenhouse gas emissions, says Blache, hence the tagline: "carbon conscious color company."  

Jeans made with Pili's technology will be available this spring from a number of high-end premium brands, he says. "Our goal is to change the entire industry, but we have to do this step-by-step: we need to focus on premium brands to start with because they can afford higher production costs for small orders, rather than the huge Chinese manufacturers with enormous outputs," says Blache.  

Over in California, biotechnology company Huue has also created drop-in replacement dyes for the denim industry, which are available now in a new line from British designer Patrick McDowell, who makes high-end garments for select buyers, such as his conventionally made Apollo Trouser, which costs £2,350. Starting with premium designers is necessary, says Huue Board Member and Material Impact Partner Corinna Chen, in agreement with Blache from Pili: luxury labels can afford small batches at a higher cost and often value the "green premium" more than giant brands.  

"It's taken us $14.6 million in investment to get to the stage of our first commercial dye, indigo for cotton - but that is just the start," she says. "We want to create drop-in replacement dyes that can work with any textile, including polyester." Even if it's synthetic and less "green," polyester is still the number one fabric in the world, she points out.  

"The goal is to eventually create all the colors of the rainbow with biotechnology, so designers will be able to mix and match every shade to meet the needs of specific brands," she explains. "Our job is to just tackle this problem in a realistic way to create things that people already want rather than try to reinvent the industry and force manufacturers to invest in new equipment and factories. 

So, by harnessing the chemical wizardry of bacteria, designers can create new technologies that dramatically reduce the destructive impacts of our old ones.  

The strap-line for the online publication Neo Life (whom I wrote for many times) was this thought-provoking line: 

"Biology is technology." Clearly aimed at Silicon Valley types, for whom nothing could be more sophisticated or impressive than technology. 

As a biologist, I think that line is actually quite insulting to biology, which has spent 3.5 billion years evolving beautiful life forms and biochemical tricks we still barely understand, even with all our genetic sequencing tools and refined ultrasound scanners.  

A more appropriate line, I think, is this from my first-year professor in biology at the University of Toronto, Dr. Spencer Barrett: "Biology is art.  

Moreover, biologists have an expression: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.  

It might then interest some readers to learn this, regarding human evolution: 

Color vision is a very recent development in life on earth: very few animals have "trichromatic" vision (meaning three types of color cell receptors in their eyes). Most people are vaguely aware that dogs "see in black and white," which isn't quite true—canines are red-green colorblind, like 7% of men.  

However, few realize how recently this appeared in our evolutionary past. Amongst mammals, trichromatic color vision is pretty much only found in primates because tree-dwelling monkeys need to be able to discern ripe red fruits from bitter green ones (unlike animals that forage on the forest floor, where fallen fruit is invariably ripe).  

Even when our ancestors came down from the trees, we retained this biological upgrade. And just like the joy we derive from our senses of taste and touch, this is a gift from evolution: food doesn't need to taste as good as it does. We could just live like ruminants subsisting on identical mouthfuls of grass every day. And reproduction doesn't need to feel as good as it does. We could simply lay our eggs on the ground and walk away without any further activity, like a fish or a frog.  

But cooking and sex are two of our greatest joys in life—further disputing the ridiculous Buddhist belief that "life is suffering. As Ruth Lloyd of CSM put it: "Color brings a lot of joy to life."  

By harnessing the brilliance of biology, that joy can be divorced from the human suffering it never needed to cause in the first place.