ABSTRACT
Humans are always fascinated with color. Throughout civilization, they invented hand spinning, knitting, handloom weaving, coloration, and nally fashion clothing with unique or various colors. Aristocrats felt that apparel with distinct color would symbolize their self-esteem, culture, identity, and social group as well as wealth. Designing of apparel in olden days was mainly dependent on the design, color, and end use. To impart different colors, craft dyers identied various sources for coloration of textiles from nature and termed the coloring matter as natural dye. Dyers extracted the natural dyes from locally available sources like vegetables, barks, roots, ower, dried insects, fruits, and even some colored soils. They classied each natural dye depending on its source, extraction procedure, and depth and tint of the color. For the development of fashion apparels for upper class and ruling people, traders imported natural dyes that had superior color value from other countries. So along with other agricultural commodities, business people traded natural dyes all over the world, which also enhanced the economy of countries (Ammayappan 2009).
