How Moroccan rugs get their color: wool, plants and natural dye
Most people notice the pattern of a Moroccan rug first. I'd suggest looking at the color. A brick red, a soft yellow or an uneven blue can offer clues about where a rug was made and how its wool was dyed.
For centuries, many of those colors came from plants gathered locally or bought in regional markets. Here is how that works.
Color comes from the landscape
There is no single "Moroccan rug." Dyeing traditions change from region to region, and so do the colors.
On the Haouz plain around Marrakech, rugs lean red, because dyers there used madder root. City workshops are different again. In Rabat, weavers began making knotted carpets in the 1700s, modeled on Ottoman carpets from Turkey and stretched long to fit the narrow rooms of Moroccan houses.
The Amazigh tradition in the Atlas Mountains
The Amazigh, often called Berbers, are the indigenous people of North Africa. In Amazigh communities across Morocco's mountains, women have long done much of the preparing, dyeing and weaving of wool. The knowledge of which plants to gather, how to mix colors and how to fix them in wool has passed from mother to daughter for generations.
Much of that knowledge was passed on by watching and doing, not through written instructions.
In the High Atlas, the palette leans toward yellow and orange, from henna, pomegranate bark and saffron. Further south, around Taznakht, weavers dye wool with henna by soaking it with slices of lemon.
Dyeing also carried its own customs. One account describes a weaver preparing herself as she would for prayer the evening before, then returning to the dye bath at dawn.
If you'd like to see this for yourself, a day of natural dyeing in the High Atlas is part of our Morocco Art & Design Journey.
The plants behind the colors
Reds and browns: madder root, henna, sumac and oak bark
Blues: indigo and woad
Yellows: weld, daphne and pomegranate bark
Black: pomegranate leaves and other plants, darkened with iron
Green: there is no green dye plant in this list. Green is made by combining yellow with indigo.
Pink: in some old carpets, the pinkish reds came from cochineal, which is an insect, not a plant.
Why wool needs help to hold color
Boiling wool with plants isn't enough. The color won't last. According to the curator of Marrakech's carpet museum, traditional dyers solved this with alum, a mineral salt. The wool was soaked in an alum bath first, and only then dyed.
Recipes recorded from older women around the Siroua mountains follow that order: alum first, then pounded madder root, boil, cool, wash. Yellow there came from apple bark and the dried flowers of a wild broom.
Indigo is different
Blue doesn't come from boiling. Indigo has to ferment. In one traditional method, it was ground to powder and mixed with hot water, figs, dates, sugar and lye. In another, figs or raisins soaked in water for 12 days before the indigo and wood-ash water went in.
What old carpets show
Scientists have tested the wool in antique carpets from Morocco's museums, including an 18th-century carpet in Marrakech described as the earliest known in the country. They found madder in the reds, cochineal in the pinks, weld or daphne in the yellows and indigo in the blues, along with mixed recipes for orange and green.
When synthetic dyes arrived
Synthetic dyes spread in Morocco from the late 1800s because they were cheaper and brighter. Early ones often faded, and accounts from the time describe carpets losing quality. Near Ouarzazate, farmers gave up their madder fields around 1920 as synthetic dyes took over.
In 1919, under the French Protectorate, an official seal was introduced for export carpets. To earn it, a carpet had to be hand-knotted, all wool and colored only with plant or animal dyes.
Where to see it
In Marrakech, the National Museum of Weaving and Carpets at Dar Si Said has a permanent display of the natural colors used in carpet dyeing.
If you're curious about another Moroccan traditional craft, read What is zellige?
Try it yourself
Reading about dyeing is one thing. Watching wool change color in the pot is another.
On my Morocco Art & Design Journey, we spend a day in the High Atlas with Amazigh women who dye wool with plants, and you can try it yourself. I expect the next rug you see will look different to you.