Kermes

Kermes is a red taken from the dried, gravid females of scale insects of the genus Kermes, chiefly Kermes vermilio, which feed on the kermes oak, Quercus coccifera, around the Mediterranean.^[1]

For most of its history nobody was certain what it was. The insect fixes itself to a twig, swells into a hard rounded body and looks exactly like a berry, so the material was collected, traded and taxed as a grain for centuries before naturalists resolved the question.^[2]

The colourant is kermesic acid, an anthraquinone. Structurally it is carminic acid without the sugar group, and that absence is the chemical reason kermes yields less colour per unit weight than cochineal and lost its market as soon as cochineal arrived.^[3]

Like the other anthraquinone reds it needs a mordant, usually an aluminium salt, to bind to wool or silk. Extracted with alkali and precipitated onto alumina it gives a lake that was for a long period one of the principal red lakes of European painting.^[4] The name crimson lake belonged to that kermes product first. It followed the trade to cochineal once carmine took the market in the sixteenth century, and in modern glossaries it is the cochineal lake that carries it.^[4]

The oldest textile dyed with Kermes vermilio yet confirmed by chemical analysis comes from the Cave of Skulls in the Judean Desert and is radiocarbon-dated to between 1954 and 1767 BCE.^[7] Jars of dried kermes reported from a Neolithic burial at Adaouste in Provence would be considerably older, but that identification has not been confirmed analytically.^[8]

Pliny describes the coccum of Galatia and of Spain at Naturalis Historia 9.141, and the scarlet grain gathered from the low-growing holm-oak at 16.32.^[5] Roman writers treat red as both a dyestuff and a face colour, though the surviving Latin rarely specifies which red is meant.^[6]

Medieval Europe knew the material as grain, and cloth coloured with it was dyed in grain, which is where the word ingrained comes from. Kermes declined through the sixteenth century as Spanish cochineal reached European markets.^[8]

Kermes has a thinner cosmetic record than its fame suggests. It is documented above all as a textile dye and a painter's lake.^[9] The surviving European recipes for rouge more often name safflower, brazilwood and, after the sixteenth century, cochineal.^[10][11]

Its clearest mark on cosmetics is linguistic. The Arabic al-qirmiz, the kermes, gives English crimson, and also alkermes, a spiced confection coloured with the insect and quietly recoloured with cochineal once kermes grew scarce.^[9]

Kermes is obsolete as a cosmetic material. It fell out of commercial use long before the modern ingredient nomenclature existed, so it carries no INCI name of its own; the insect red the European Union lists for cosmetics is carmine, which stands as CI 75470 in Annex IV to Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, the positive list of colourants permitted in cosmetic products.^[13]

It survives in two narrow places. In conservation science, kermesic acid found in a textile or a paint layer helps date and locate the object and tell it apart from a cochineal-dyed one.^[12][14] Among hand dyers, small quantities of the dried insect are still bought and used.^[12]