Yes I believe urine is still used to set dyes in some places, possibly Morrocco?

This is why dye workshops were located outside town walls, they tended to be stinky businesses, but it's also clear, very important ones. The improvement in dyes contributed to a boom in the textile industry in Europe in the late Medieval period.

For poor people, kermes, madder and woad remained important dyes which is why you saw a lot of lighter blues and red. But the average person was probably poorer in the 18th and 19th Century than in the late medieval period when many of this stuff was affordable, since from period artwork and records we know that all colors and numerous patterns were available to common people by the 14th Century, among other things they were constantly putting out new laws to prevent low-born commoners from wearing cloth of gold and damask silk fabrics and so on. In the 16th Century the Landsknecht mercenaries were famously free of all the sumptuary laws and flaunted it with every color in the rainbow and every pattern imaginable.

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Generally movies, TV shows and genre fiction depict people in any pre-industrial era as way too drab, either as medieval cavemen or as what I call "pastel peasants", and also way too dirty particularly for the medieval era, when people did bathe routinely, usually at least once a week.


I always wondered if Kermes dye had anything to do with Kermis festivals were a big deal in the rural areas of Europe from the medieval period into the late Early-Modern?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermesse_(festival)

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