WHY NO PURPLE WATER DYE?

Email from Steve 10 Feb 23

I love your wood dyes but you need a clean purple, i am working  on rainbow colours staining pine, you have all the primary colours except purple . You should develop this in your range to be able to make a proper rainbow colours. The colour needs to clean colour like your blue but the purple equivalent.

My response:

Hello Steve

Yeah, sorry, but we had purple for about 8 years and almost all users said it was the one colour they really didn’t want or like, so we dropped it around 12 years ago, with most users preferring to make their own by mixing primary colours red and blue, to make the secondary colour purple.

If you decide to do this do a few trial runs and note down the exact amount of each colour used in the mix so you can get an exact match each time you mix them.

To start use an eye dropper, add a drop of each, mix and if that’s what you want stop there. For variation try adding more red or blue. Bear in mind that there is no white to lighten the colour so adding a drop of water will help a little with that. The white will come from the wood colour pine, oak, etc

The purple was not a good colour on white woods, horrible on blond and awful on anything much darker slightly darker coloured woods.

Unfortunately dying wood is fraught with colour differences you won’t find on a pure white background. These colour differences can occur even on the same piece of wood and purple was one of the worst for this.

One of the few woods it seemed to take to pretty well was jacaranda but even then, it wasn’t a pleasing colour.

We don’t make our own dyes we purchase them from a dye manufacturer.

Sorry I can’t be of more help than this.

Kind regards

Neil Ellis