inkVermilion
ชาด
Red mercury sulphide, for charms, and it fades
What it is
Cinnabar red, diluted, mixed with herbs and other things, and used for charms rather than for the standing marks.
The long version
Shway Yoe: all the more important charms are reserved for other parts of the body and executed in vermilion. The a-nu se, the drug of tenderness, is vermilion mixed with herbs and the dried skin of the tokay gecko; a few dots in a triangle between the eyes are enough.
It fades — everybody says so — and a fading charm gets redone.
Attested — the mercury in cinnabar is toxic. The sources this site quotes do not raise that, and it is not offered here as advice about anything; it is a fact about the pigment named in them.
Connected to
- Lampblack The colour that stays.
Named here by
- Htoe kwin The other colour: charms, in red, which fade.
- Lampblack The other colour, and the one that fades on purpose.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive
- Cinnabar — Wikipedia (en)
- Vermilion — Wikipedia (en)
- Tattooing in Myanmar — Wikipedia (en)
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there