# Kermes

**Grana di chermes**

**Known today as.** The dried bodies of female kermes scale insects, which yield a red dye used since antiquity.

Kind: Animal

## What did Canale use it for?

In the electuary (ch. 6).

## What does modern science say?

In medicine it was the base of the confection alkermes, compounded with ambergris, musk, pearls, and gold leaf.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **kermesic acid**: an anthraquinone, the red
- **flavokermesic acid**: 

**Mechanism.** The dried females of the kermes scale insect, a parasite of the kermes oak; its only coloured component is kermesic acid, an anthraquinone. The Italian liqueur alchermes, which descends from the Confectio Alkermes, takes its scarlet and its name from it.

**Dose.** Inert.

**Standing.** Replaced in general use in Europe by Mexican cochineal, whose carmine is the food colour E120, after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.

## What lore surrounds it?

Its scarlet reaches back to Neolithic burials near Aix-en-Provence and forward into Scripture, where the Hebrew *tola’at shani*, “scarlet worm,” names this insect dye,. Medieval Italian and Sicilian scarlets dyed with it were prized above Tyrian purple, and the dried insects, like grains of wheat, gave English the phrase “dyed in the grain.” It was replaced in general use in Europe only after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire brought Mexican cochineal, a stronger dye, into European trade.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Pliny.** Names the red of the kermes first among the three principal colours of dyed cloth, which “beginning in the tints of the rose, reflects, when viewed sideways and held up to the light, the shades that are found in the Tyrian purple”; the berries of Galatia, Africa, and Lusitania furnish the coccus, “a dye reserved for the military costume of our generals.”

## Sources

- Wikipedia, “Kermes (dye).”
- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 21.22, 22.3, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library.
- Wikipedia, “Alchermes.”
- Wikipedia, “Kermesic acid.”
- Wikipedia, “Cochineal.”

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*Kermes.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/kermes

Historical description, not medical advice.