S4 Ep1: Scary Tales of Pigments Past, Part 1

Unnwrap the rich brown paint popular among the pre-raphelite brotherhood known as Mummy Brown. If your skin is crawling it’s for a good reason. This is the name of a color of paint. Couldn’t they have just called it sand brown? Sandstorm tan, flooded Nile soil? Something else? Nope, mummy’s the word for this rich brown paint. There’s no getting around it. The pigment for Mummy Brown a.k.a. “Egyptian Brown” paint was literally made up of ground up Egyptian mummies, both humans and cats.