This week on the channel +4.8M views this week

Failed malaria chemistry makes mauve on SciShow

Hank Green follows William Henry Perkin's accidental purple dye from Victorian fashion into the foundations of modern pharmaceuticals.

Channel:

SciShow Story of October 23, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The channel's weekly summary: what went up this week, what is drawing views now, and where the channel stands among similar channels.

How the Color Mauve Saved Millions of Lives

Things we can learn from the video

Press to jump

1:29William Henry Perkin attempts to synthesize quinine using coal-tar chemistry.
3:41Refining the failed experiment's dark sludge with methanol produces a vibrant purple dye.
5:31Perkin patents the dye and starts manufacturing it with his family.
6:36Empress Eugénie and Queen Victoria help make mauve a fashion sensation.
8:10Coal-tar chemistry connects the dye industry to synthetic salicylic acid and aspirin.
9:27Methylene blue finds uses in tissue staining and malaria treatment.

The useful discovery is hiding in the sludge. In SciShow's "How the Color Mauve Saved Millions of Lives", Hank Green follows a failed attempt to synthesize quinine to an unexpectedly vivid purple dye, and then far beyond the wardrobe.

Perkin's coal-tar experiments did not deliver the malaria treatment he wanted. But refining the residue produced a dye he could manufacture, patent and sell. Green follows mauve into fashionable society, with Queen Victoria and Empress Eugénie helping its popularity, before tracing how the dye industry's chemistry fed medicinal research. Aspirin and methylene blue bring the story back toward the medicine cabinet.

At roughly 390,000 views, it is the most watched of SciShow's five uploads this week. Viewers are picking up on the mauve background lighting, imagining the entrance a newly available clothing color could make, and discovering that the word's pronunciation varies across the Atlantic.

The newer "Why Weed Doesn't Work on Everyone", hosted by Savannah Geary, currently has the strongest daily momentum. Its exploration of differences in body chemistry also drew slightly more views in its first day than the mauve episode. "Why Can't Every Shot Be a Pill?" is gathering attention too, while the previous week's "Why Doesn't Gold Tarnish?" remains active with its mixture of atomic behavior and special relativity.

Denali Kincaid's deep-sea mysteries and Dr. Imogene Cancellare's feline-treatment story round out the releases. Across the catalog, SciShow added about 4.8 million views, with daily viewing modestly above its usual pace and subscribers unchanged. The week's biggest new audience, though, came to a chemistry experiment that failed at its original job.

Published on Trari

Where next?

Also in Science and experimentsVideo taking off 26x its usual first dayA giant space magnet raises the possibility of antimatter starsBBC Earth Science follows Sam Ting's detector from Endeavour's final mission to signals that could point toward something unexpected in the cosmos.Channel: BBC Earth Science · Story of October 24, 2026

A different discovery todayVideo people are talking about 11x its usual commentsZelenskyy tells Steven Bartlett why he needed "ammunition, not a ride"In a nearly two-hour conversation, Ukraine's president moves from sleepless nights and grieving parents to Bucha, Paddington Bear and the morning the invasion …Channel: The Diary Of A CEO · Story of October 24, 2026

What viewers say

I had to pause the video to look up if I've been pronouncing "mauve" wrong my whole life. No. I've apparently been pronouncing it the British way. I am not British.
@riverfortune1990See it on YouTube
Anyone else appreciate that they changed the background lighting to mauve?
@dregoth0See it on YouTube
Can you imagine what a sensation it would be to show up at a fancy event back then with an outfit dyed some new colour like this that _nobody had been able to make_ before, while everybody else is wearing the limited colours they actually could use?
@siberx4See it on YouTube

3 more comments

(me in the 1800s): wake up babe, new color just dropped
@MrDave2306See it on YouTube
Mauvelous! Simply Mauvelous!
@nnonotnowSee it on YouTube
This is why societies should always invest in science. We don't know what we don't know.
@thecelticforgeSee it on YouTube

Public comments from the video's page on YouTube