Mummy Brown

A weekly dose of macabre history, gently pressed into your hands like a haunted educational pamphlet.

Yes, that was a real pigment.

And yes, it was exactly as horrifying as it sounds.

For centuries, European artists could buy a brown pigment known as Mummy Brown or Egyptian Brown. It was made using ground-up Egyptian mummies.

Because apparently, at some point, someone looked at a human mummy and thought:

“Gorgeous. But what if it was paint?”

The pigment was valued for its rich, transparent brown tone and was used by some artists in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was part art supply, part grave robbery, part “we really need to talk about your sourcing practices.”

Antique tubes of Mummy Brown pigment by C. Roberson of London with a brown color swatch, a bituminous pigment made from ground Egyptian mummies

And the worst part?

Some artists may not have even realized the name was literal.

Imagine finishing a moody masterpiece and then discovering your warm shadows were made from a desecrated ancient person.

Congratulations. You invented haunted beige.

Mummy Brown eventually fell out of favor because of bad publicity, unstable quality, and the minor inconvenience of running out of mummies. The art supplier C. Roberson reportedly discontinued it in the 1960s.

Not the 1860s.

The 1960s.

So to review

People ate mummy as medicine.
People sold mummy as pigment.
People painted with mummy.
And somehow everyone acted like this was a normal Tuesday.

Seance scent pairing

This one belongs to The Mummy — ancient, strange, resinous, and carrying the kind of backstory that makes polite society clutch its pearls and quietly keep reading.

Until next week,
stay curious. Stay haunted. And please stop turning corpses into office supplies.

Yo, we do not condone desecrating ancient remains. We are here to learn from history… not speed run a museum crime.