FUCUS, a name given by the ancients to certain dyes and paints. By this name they called a purple sea plant used by them to dye woollen and linen things of that colour. The dye was very beautiful, but not lasting; for it soon began to change, and in time went wholly off. This is the account Theophratus gives of it.

The women of those times also used something called fucus, to stain their cheeks red; and many have supposed, from the same word expressing both, that the same substance was used on both occasions. But this, on a strict inquiry, proves not to be the case. The Greeks called every thing fucus that would stain or paint the flesh. But this peculiar substance used by the women to paint their cheeks was distinguished from the others by the name of rizium among the more correct writers, and was indeed a root brought from Syria into Greece. The Latins, in imitation of the Greek name, called this root radicula; and Pliny very erroneously confounds the plant with the radix lunaria, or fruthion of the Greeks.

The word fucus was in those times become such an universal name for paint, that the Greeks and Romans had a fucus metallicus, which was the ceruse used for painting the neck and arms white: after which they used the purpurifum, or red fucus of the rizium, to give the colour to the cheeks. In after-times they also use a peculiar fucus or paint for the purpose, prepared of the creta argentaria, or silver-chalk, and some of the rich purple dyes that were in use at that time: and this seems to have been very little different from our rose-pink; a colour commonly sold at the colour-shops, and used on like occasions.