Natural Dye

Russ, a naturalist who works with the Palos Verdes Nature Conservancy, showed us this dye on our New Year's Day hike.
Cochineal is a traditional red dye of pre-Hispanic Mexico. This precious dyestuff was obtained not from a plant, but from an insect that lives its life sucking on a plant. The host plants are the flattened stems (pads or cladodes) of certain prickly pear cacti (platyopuntias, Opuntia), especially the species called nopales. The animal is a scale insect that manufactures a deep maroon pigment and stores this pigment in body fluids and tissues. Early Mixtec Indians required dyestuffs because the color of daily attire was carefully codified to signal social status. They required fast colors, i.e., those that would not fade, and Mixtecs heavily used indigo, derived from native legumes, for blues and cochineal for various shades of red.