Man, humans really risk their lives utilizing the most toxic elements as pigments just to get some sick colors on their stuff.
Uranium glass, radium (and tritium) dials, uranium orange (uranium oxide), cadmium yellow, lead white, arsenic green, london purple (which also contained arsenic), etc. I'm sure the list goes on.
First thing i gathered from all this is that man, arsenic in particular has really wicked optic properties, that stuff is used in so many pigments. Sucks it's also deadly, like real deadly, fish cartonisly floating in the water upside down and cross eyed kind of deadly.
Second of all, it really shows how humans are a really solution oriented species. Like, if we have a problem and we discover a material/element/compound that's really useful for that problem because of it's properties, our first instict is to develop a solution to the problem. And once the solution works and it doesn't seem to cause inmediate harm, we just fucking roll with it and make it mainstream. Then, unfortunately, like 35 years later a group of scientist (bless their hearts) will be like "actually, this is really fucking bad for you, in fact, you shouldn't even touch it with a ten foot pole". And the engineers will go back to the drawing board (or maybe not, because the companies decide to postpone it as much as possible though lying, gaslighting and overall toomfoolery cause capitalism).
Also it's really fucking funny how people that are born in generations where the danger of something that was widely used back then is known will be like "lol, lmao even, couldn't be me. This guys were dumb as rocks". Like they won't be saying that about us in the future with microplastics and stuff. For real though, it's honestly kind of problematic how good we are at internalizing information that has been discovered and how bad we are at putting ourselves in the place of the people that didn't have access to that information. Like yeah, everything seems really intuitive when you're given the full picture, the troublesome part is to fucking get there. I think this is part of why it's so difficult to get research funded in things that don't seem directly useful.
In conclusion, if a new radical pigment or material appears I would wait a bit if I were you before using it in every square inch of your house.
