S22 - Session O4 - Responsible Color: Cultural, environmental, and ethical sustainability - Color & Care Design

Authors: Delphine Talbot *

Polysensoriality of colors, consideration of the medicinal virtues of plants, physiological inclusion of the vibrations of dyed colors .... The conference proposes to revisit the corpus of cross-uses of tinctorial and medicinal plants in different cultures. Within ancient and current traditional practices, certain colors from plants are invested for their healing, protective, cosmetic and aesthetic potential. Based on this knowledge and their holistic understanding, the ambition will be to offer interdisciplinary research in order to develop ranges of colors for therapeutic purposes. Investing in the skin as a sensitive receptacle for plant potential, through textiles, is an innovative approach. Color and sensory design allows colors to be conceived not only in their chromatic dimension but also in their material reality. The colored matter and the coloring material contain a considerable number of properties which the skin, the body, will infuse. Beyond the symbolic dimension granted in historical or anthropological texts, it will be a question of questioning the real activation of plant properties. Chromatic diffusion does not only occur in the plant extraction tank, it also occurs in the body ... From the plant to the skin, the conference will visit the sensory principles activated thanks to plant colors and will invest in the pluri-dimension color for multiple and conscious uses. Examples as indigo, safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.), saffron or also alkanet (Alkanna tinctoria) are traditional plants which mainly interest this project, especially for their known international uses, both for their deying, cosmetic and curative properties.