Go green with home-made colours

Manmeet Singh Gill

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, March 19

With Holi, the festival of colours, two days away, the local market has been swarmed by synthetic colours and sophisticated water guns. The presence of traditional natural colours, such as gulal, is negligible.

The harms which the chemical-based colours inflict on skin and eyes are well known. Medical experts, along with different organisations working for environment conservation, have been advising people to shun the use of chemical colours for years.

In absence of availability of natural colours, the people have no option other than buying chemical colours. Natural colours can be made easily at home, using food ingredients which are present in every kitchen. More importantly, as these are made of food ingredients, these are edible and cause no harm to eyes or even if swallowed mistakenly. Even kids aren’t at risk with the natural colours.

A wide array of colours can be prepared at home using powder of arrowroot, hena, rattanjot, turmeric and annato seeds. Different colour shades can be made by altering the ratio of these ingredients. The foremost advantage of these homemade colours is that they are not allergic to skin.

Even the flowers of marigold, tesu, amaltas, rind of pomegranate, slice of beetroot for deep pink or magenta, madder rhizome of turmeric for yellow shade, and golden drop roots for deep red, henna leaves for green, annatto seeds for orange and jacaranda flowers for blue can be used. Rose and dailian can be mixed for fragrance.

To make a dry powder, these can be mixed in base ingredients as besan, arraroot and rice powder. Two or more of these ingredients can be mixed to prepare a colour. The choice and variety of colours would depend on one’s creativity and imagination. For wet solution, these can be mixed in water, soaked overnight to get a deep color.

Arrowroot and hena can be mixed to get different shades of green. Rattanjot, if mixed with arrowroot, gives different shades of purple. Similarly, arrowroot and annato produce orange shades.