HELP Ghassen build his unique purple dye factory!

This is Mohamed Ghassen Nouira, a very good friend of mine from Carthage (in modern day Tunisia). As many of you already know, Ghassen have dedicated the last 17 years of his life in the revival of the most prestigious dye in known history - Tyrian purple. This rare pigment, once produced from marine Murex mollusks, forged empires, felled kings and queens, and cemented the power of generations of global rulers and yet the exact recipe of its production has been lost for nearly 600 years.

His story with the color purple began in history class more than 30 years ago at the age of 14 and for some reason it has dwelt in his heart and soul ever since. He became literally obsessed with this pigment once worth nearly 70 times its weight in gold and wanted nothing more than to bring it back to life. In 2007, Ghassen came across a Murex snail oozing purple on the shore of Carthage, that day marked the beginning of an incredible journey that would set him in on a quest to revive the most prestigious color of all time!

17 years of passion, research, sleepless nights, trials, errors, tremendous sacrifices, and excruciating work eventually paid off as he is currently the owner of the world’s biggest collection of Tyrian purple extracts. He was also honoured to exhibit his work in some of the world’s most prestigious museums including the British museum and the Harvard museum of fine arts among many others…

This being said, Ghassen thinks that at this stage, he has reached a level of skills and expertise that allows him to move forward and make his ultimate dream (and that of thousands of others around the world) come true by reproducing an actual replica of a fully operational old-fashioned Tyrian purple factory that would shed the light on how this precious dye was produced thousands of years ago. The project will consist in building a dye factory next to his current workshop in Tunisia (inspired from ancient historical texts) complete with stone furnaces, choldron, maceration basins and Murex tanks... using the ingredients of the time to ferment the dye and use it to dye all kinds of fabrics. The factory will also be used in the recycling of all the other parts of the Murex mollusks so that nothing ever goes to waste. Indeed the factory will also produce Murex lime, Murex garum, Purpurissum (purple paint pigments) as well as incense fixatives derived from the mollusks opercula.

To my knowledge, nothing of this scale has been attempted in over 500 years and I am more than confident that this project will contribute in providing a much better understanding of the different stages associated with the dyeing process and bring back to life the colors of royalty the way they were produced thousands of years ago.

Ghassen’s primary estimation for the cost of a project of such scale would be around 50000$ including the building of the roofed structures, the tools, the man hours as well as the raw material necessary to make the factory fully operational within 2 years.

Thanks to your contributions, I really hope that together we can make this dream come true and bring back to life the most prestigious color of all time!

Link:

Check out Ghassen’s work on YouTube: Why Tyrian Purple Dye Is So Expensive | So Expensive | Insider Business