What You Need to Know Before Buying a Black Turkish Rug

Here’s a mystery for you: why aren’t there any antique black rugs? I’ve learned a lot about color, dye, and the finer points of the near-eastern biosphere since I started learning about rugs. A client once requested a black rug, and I spent a month trying to source one from my usual suppliers: sellers of traditional, hand-knitted, naturally-dyed rugs. But I couldn’t find black.

As I learned more about how rug makers dyed wool, I learned why black rugs are so rare: the traditional process of dyeing wool black involves soaking the wool in tannic acid, the insides of wounds on oak trees, and iron salts. This natural dyeing process makes the wool black, but actually begins to degrade the wool, meaning primarily-black rugs made 60+ years ago have largely dissolved away by now.

This was a big eye opener for me: not only were synthetic dyes in some cases better than vegetable dyes, but there were more than a few alleged antiques that, well, weren’t so antique. So I made an exception to my general preference for vegetable dyes: if we’re looking for black, the dye needs to be synthetic.