Arsenic Green: Only a Test Shows Which Dresses Held It

In 1861 a young flower maker made leaves colored green with arsenite of copper. An inquest jury blamed Matilda Scheurer's death on that pigment [1]. A year earlier a physician had written that the same green colored leaves worn on bonnets, head-dresses and wreaths [2]. His analysis also found it in the stars on a white evening dress [3].

A dress's color cannot show arsenic, but a test can. A university lab found arsenic in an 1860s silk dress in 2014, while a kit test on another dress in 2019 settled nothing [4][5].

The people who wore these greens are harder to trace. Writers in 1860 and 1861 said wearers suffered too, or probably did, but none named a wearer who did [1][2]. This page therefore marks harm to wearers as evidence insufficient, which is not the same as calling the greens harmless. It covers history only and gives no advice on handling, cleaning, storing or testing old clothes.

What was arsenic green?

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In December 1860 the physician Arthur Hill Hassall gave one green three names: "arsenite of copper, Scheele's green, or emerald green" [2]. He wrote that it colored the green leaves and flowers worn "on bonnets, head-dresses, wreaths, and other similar ornaments" in the past year or two [2]. The reports of the 1861 inquest call it arsenite of copper [1][6].

Later references keep the names apart. ColourLex, a pigment reference, describes emerald green as copper(II) acetoarsenite, also called Paris green and Schweinfurt green, and dates it to 1814 [7][8]. The Wellcome Collection's catalogue pairs Scheele's green with copper arsenite and Paris green with copper acetoarsenite [9]. No source read for this page gives a date or a formula for Scheele's green itself.

A 2024 study in Heritage Science, read here only in its abstract, finds Scheele's green hard to identify in old objects [10]. It says the pigment was often a mixture of uncertain makeup [10]. Making emerald green, it proposes, may have yielded a little Scheele's green [10]. Any account of how these greens were made is historical process, described for history only — these materials are toxic or caustic.

So a test that finds arsenic in an old green does not, on its own, say which green it found. The band above, row by row:

The flower makers' case

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Who was Matilda Scheurer?

Matilda Scheurer made leaves in the artificial-flower warehouse of Mr. Bergerond, of Judd Street, Brunswick Square [1]. Her mother told the inquest that she had been ill several times over a year and a half [1]. The surgeon, Mr. Paul, said he had treated her four times in eighteen months [1]. After her death he found arsenite of copper in her lungs, with her liver "highly impregnated" and the mesenteric glands as well [1].

The British Medical Journal gave the cause of death as inflammation of the stomach lining "produced by the inhalation of the arsenite of copper" [1]. The jury found that she "died accidentally, from the effects of mortal disease in her stomach and other organs, occasioned by arsenite of copper used in her employment" [1]. The Lancet printed nearly the same verdict on the same day but gave her age as eighteen, not nineteen [1][6]. Neither report gives the date she died.

A sister of hers "had died under similar circumstances," the British Medical Journal adds [1]. Her employer told the inquest that ninety-eight girls worked for him. They had objected to the masks he suggested as too hot and wore muslin over their mouths instead [1].

The Lancet called masks or muslin "a precaution of the most imperfect and inefficient character" [6]. It wanted the pigment's use made a crime, as it lately had been in France [6]. Hassall had been told there were "from two to three hundred" leaf-makers using it, mostly young women and girls but also some men and boys, all with symptoms of arsenical poisoning [2]. All of this is historical process, described for history only — these materials are toxic or caustic.

The two reports, point by point:

Did arsenic green harm the women who wore it?

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Writers of the time said it did, or probably did, but they named no one. After describing the leaf-makers, Hassall wrote: "It is highly probable, however, that the wearers of these ornaments do not altogether escape" [2]. A British Medical Journal editorial of 30 November 1861 was titled "A Word of Caution to the Wearers of Artificial Flowers" [1]. It opened by saying that "in many cases" users of the finished articles had suffered arsenical poisoning, yet the only death it described was the flower maker's [1].

The rest of the editorial pleaded for the makers. It said the journal could "safely assume" that the leaves "giving an artificial verdant splendour to the locks of some of our countrywomen" were the ones whose making had killed the girl [1].

In 1860 a reader sent The Lancet a few stars from a daughter's newly bought white evening dress [3]. Hassall reported that they were "undoubtedly coloured with arsenite of copper" and that slight friction rubbed much of it off [3]. The note says nothing about the daughter's health [3].

Punch made the fear a joke on 8 February 1862 with "The Arsenic Waltz," a dance of skeletons dedicated "to the Green Wreath and Dress-Mongers" [11]. Alison Matthews David's 2015 book Fashion Victims has a chapter titled "Poisonous Pigments: Arsenical Greens" [12]. It could not be read for this page, so nothing here rests on it.

Set side by side, the record holds deaths and illness among the people who made the leaves and only warnings about the people who wore them. Harm to wearers is therefore marked evidence insufficient, in the sense the site's method page gives the term. The corset entry sorts another claim about dress and harm the same way.

What a test can show

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A test turns a suspicion into a record. In August 2014 Ingrid Mida, unpacking a donation for Toronto Metropolitan University's Fashion Research Collection, recognized the green of an 1860s silk dress and suspected arsenic [4]. On 5 September 2014 the dress, FRC2014.07.406 A+B+C, was tested in the university's physics lab and did contain arsenic, the collection reported [4]. The report names no method and no compound; it calls the color Scheele's green, but the test as reported found arsenic only.

In 2019 the Houston Museum of Natural Science tested a dress tentatively dated to the 1870s with a kit made for soil samples [5]. The result was negative, yet the museum said the test may have been too brief, so it could not be sure whether the dress held arsenic [5].

The Bata Shoe Museum says the dark green satin of a pair of Adelaide boots, from about the 1840s, tested positive for an arsenic-based dye [13]. It does not say how.

This site calls that kind of record the fade record: an object's documented color history, holding only recorded storage, tests and treatment, with everything else marked not verified. For a green dress, arsenic enters the fade record only when a test puts it there. Other colors here are settled the same way: wool from Timna counts as Tyrian purple because analysis found snail dye in it [14]. The Glen Affric tartan's green counts as indigo or woad because dye analysis found it, as the indigo dye entry explains [15].

The chart as a table:

Cite this page

Sources

1. 1"A Word of Caution to the Wearers of Artificial Flowers" (editorial), p. 584, and "Death from Artificial Flower Making" (news), p. 598. British Medical Journal, 30 November 1861. https://archive.org/details/sim_british-medical-journal_july-6-december-28-1861_2_1 (scanned copy, read for verification; short quotations from the public-domain text)
2. 2Arthur Hill Hassall. "On the Danger of Green Paint in Artificial Leaves and Flowers." The Lancet 76, no. 1944 (1 December 1860): 535. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(02)57292-5 (scanned copy, read for verification; short quotations from the public-domain text)
3. 3"To Correspondents" (letter from Melius Inquirendum, with Dr. Hassall's report). The Lancet, 1 December 1860, p. 554. https://archive.org/details/sim_the-lancet_1860-12-01_1944 (scanned copy, read for verification; short quotation from the public-domain text)
4. 4Ingrid Mida. "The Arsenic Green Dress." Fashion Research Collection, Toronto Metropolitan University, 24 November 2015 (dress FRC2014.07.406 A+B+C). https://www.torontomu.ca/content/dam/fashionresearchcollection/research-articles/Arsenic_Green_Dress.pdf (full text; paraphrased, not quoted)
5. 5Houston Museum of Natural Science. "The Deadly Dress Test!" Beyond Bones blog, 10 July 2019. https://blog.hmns.org/2019/07/the-deadly-dress-test/ (full text; paraphrased, not quoted)
6. 6"Legal Arsenical Poisoning" (Medical Annotations). The Lancet, 30 November 1861, p. 530. https://archive.org/details/sim_the-lancet_1861-11-30_1996 (scanned copy, read for verification; short quotations from the public-domain text)
7. 7ColourLex. "Emerald Green." https://colourlex.com/project/emerald-green/ (full text; paraphrased, not quoted)
8. 8ColourLex. "Timeline for Green Pigments." https://colourlex.com/pigments/pigment-timelines/timeline-green-pigments/ (full text; paraphrased, not quoted)
9. 9Wellcome Collection. "A skeleton gentleman at a ball asks a skeleton lady to dance; representing the effect of arsenical dyes and pigments in clothing and accessories. Wood engraving, 1862." 36772i (catalogue data). https://wellcomecollection.org/works/awbr7whm (collection record (catalogue data, CC0))
10. 10Leonardo Pantoja Munoz. "Hidden in plain sight: revisiting the synthesis, characterisation, degradation and the intricate relationship between Scheele's green and Emerald green." Heritage Science 12 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-024-01192-7 (abstract only) License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
11. 11"The Arsenic Waltz. The New Dance of Death. (Dedicated to the Green Wreath and Dress-Mongers.)" Punch, or the London Charivari 42 (8 February 1862): 54. https://archive.org/details/punchv4200lemo (scanned copy, read for verification)
12. 12Alison Matthews David. Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Chapter 3, "Poisonous Pigments: Arsenical Greens," pp. 72–101. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474275941.ch-003 (bibliographic record only)
13. 13Bata Shoe Museum. "Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of 19th Century Dress" (exhibition page). https://batashoemuseum.ca/fashion-victims/ (full text; paraphrased, not quoted)
14. 14Naama Sukenik, David Iluz, Zohar Amar, Alexander Varvak, Orit Shamir and Erez Ben-Yosef. "Early evidence of royal purple dyed textile from Timna Valley (Israel)." PLOS ONE 16, no. 1 (2021): e0245897. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245897 (full text) License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
15. 15V&A Dundee. "Scotland's oldest tartan discovered by Scottish Tartans Authority." 26 March 2023. https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/info/scotland-s-oldest-tartan-discovered-by-scottish-tartans-authority (full text; paraphrased)