Indigo Jeans

Brad Pitt, we will always love you. Even as an old man in Benjamin Button, we still thought you were pretty dreamy.

Now it’s hard for us not to give snaps to Brad every week (honestly, does he ever not look good?), but this time around, we couldn’t stop ourselves.

Absolutely stylin’ in a dark pair of indigo jeans this past Monday, Brad shows the gentlemen out there how to hit the town in an indigo jean outfit.

With his navy collared shirt and jean blazer, Brad’s clearly saying (obviously in his sexy voice), “Hey, look at me. I’m not afraid to wear an indigo denim jacket with indigo jeans, so you shouldn’t be either.”

You should, however, be afraid of black shoes with an indigo jacket and indigo jeans. We call that a faux pas, Mr. Pitt. And, now that we think of it, the hair is looking a little out of control, as well…

Okay, okay…we’ll overlook it this time, Brad. But only because you’ve always been there for me…

I mean us.

image courtesy of dailymail.co.uk

posted by: deborah on October 23, 2009 at 10:27 am
filed under: Trend Alert | Add a comment
TAGS: indigo jeans, snaps of the week

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Ever wonder what makes blue jeans blue?

Well, today is your lucky day! Stick with us, and you’ll learn everything you’ve ever wanted to know (and more) about indigo dye—the chemical responsible for giving your blue jeans their intense indigo color.

Many people are unaware, but indigo dye is almost as old as civilization itself. Archeologists have even found it in cloth wrapped around Egyptian mummies and on Babylonian tablets. It’s hard to believe, but the intense blue color comes from a couple of unassuming green plants:

The indigo plant

The woad plant

But getting the deep blue out of these plants is no easy task! And our ancestors devised quite the recipe to extract the dye—one that started with 3.5 gallons of stale urine and 4.5 ounces of salt.

That’s right, your eyes are not deceiving you—traditional indigo dye recipes called for vast quantities of urine. In some parts of the world, dyers even paid their neighbors for bowls of urine in order to create the dye that was called “blue gold,” for more reasons than one.

If you’re wondering how this traditional recipe was stumbled upon in the first place, we are right there with you. Unfortunately, we don’t have any clue, but we’ll let y’all marinate on that one for a bit…

Anyhow, the good news, for all of you out there who find yourselves a little bewildered, is that if your indigo jeans are younger than one hundred years old, their blue tint is a product of indigo and other less offensive ingredients. Modern day scientists have devised chemical alternatives that our blue jean suppliers have adopted.

New dye formulas for our indigo jeans—yet another reason to love science. Thank you science, indeed.

posted by: danielle on October 13, 2009 at 5:27 pm
filed under: Denim 101 | comments (1)
TAGS: history of jeans, blue jeans, indigo jeans

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