Victorian England was enjoying prosperity thanks to the Industrial Revolution, but less enjoyable was watching their green fields and clean air get replaced by ugly factories, smog, and grime. They couldn’t hide this away with dim candle lighting, as the invention of gas lights meant that even the night was now bright enough to take note of what a travesty the landscape had become. People became nostalgic for what they’d lost, and it was around this time that England began to construct public parks to bring a bit of green back to the city. The trouble with parks, though, is that they’re outside, and have I mentioned the smog? For plenty of folks (me included), they preferred to take their outside inside, thank you very much. They wanted vibrant green ferns on their wallpaper, sumptuous emerald gowns, and faux foliage for their hats that was every bit as nice as what their grandmother might have grown in the countryside. Green is a notoriously hard color to get right with dyes, though. Even when you do manage a nice shade, it tends to fade out rather quickly.

Enter, Karl Scheele.

Now, Scheele had already had a run of bad luck when a gorgeous yellow he’d invented (Turner’s patent yellow, named for the British company that stole the rights) was snatched up and patented by someone else. He must have felt very fortunate, then, to have struck gold a second time in 1775 with the creation of a rich, plant-like green that lacked the nasty yellow or gray undertones of so many of its competitors. There was just one problem: the creation process relied heavily upon the use of copper arsenite, or just arsenic as it’s usually called. Scheele was aware of the hazards of the color, but just couldn’t stop himself from grabbing for that money, no matter who got hurt.

This color was everywhere in Europe in no time at all, as commonplace then as plastics are for us today (and just as harmful). The use of Scheele’s green in wallpaper was often blamed for the many victims who reported headaches, abdominal cramps, severe vomiting, lethargy, and skin rashes or lesions. It was said that the fine dust that would flake off the wallpaper could get into the lungs or mucous membranes of the body and build up overtime. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, a great lover of the popular green wallpapers, was found to have a highly elevated concentration of arsenic in his body after an autopsy.

What’s baffling is that everyone knew arsenic was toxic, too. That didn’t stop people from consuming arsenic wafers for a paler complexion, even as they used the same stuff to poison rats. Though people were suffering from numerous health complaints due to the prevalent, deadly green, it wasn’t until twenty-one people died (the Bradford Sweets Poisonings, as they were called) from arsenic-laden candies in 1858 that something was done..oh, wait. No. It still took another ten years for the UK to act. Even then, it didn’t ban arsenic from foods, only set limits for what it considered “an acceptable amount.”

And if you thought the health impact was terrible on people who were wearing the clothes, enjoying the candies, or sitting in rooms with the wallpaper, well…spare a thought for the poor workers who had to make the things. In 1859, a Dr. Ange-Gabriel-Maxime Vernois was taking a tour of the ateliers in Paris. He found workers fully covered in the poisonous green dust of the products they were making. Workers were covered in lesions, suffered constant headaches, and were dropping like flies. He observed that their terrifying ailments were due to the high levels of arsenic present in the items they were making but working conditions did not improve and the demand for the poisonous green did not abate. Things were so bad that in 1861 a girl of just nineteen passed away after a horrific illness due to the arsenic in the artificial flowers she was making. The historian Alison Matthews David wrote of her that “she vomited green waters; the whites of her eyes had turned green, and she told her doctor that ‘everything she looked at was green.’” In an autopsy, arsenic was found in her stomach, liver, and lungs.

Typically, it wasn’t until the rich put their foot down that things began to change. In 1879, Queen Victoria hosted a visiting dignitary at her palace. When they arrived late the next day for an audience, they complained that they’d been sick overnight and thought it was likely due to the green wallpaper surrounding the bed. Queen Victoria immediately had the wallpaper removed from the entire palace, and her country moved to emulate her.

Scheele’s green may not be available at your local Sherwin Williams, but there have been plenty of cases even today where known hazardous materials (cigarettes, asbestos, and lead) were widely used because of their popularity or simply because it was cheap to do so. It’s scary to think of how easily we can be exposed to toxins in our environment, no matter how advanced or intelligent we may consider ourselves to be as a people.