Description

Winsor & Newton’s Winton Oil Paint – Permanent Alizarin Crimson, 200ml tube.

A deep, cool-toned crimson with strong tinting power and rich transparency. This colour sits between red and violet, making it a versatile choice for shadows, florals, drapery, and skin tones with a cooler undertone. Its transparency makes it excellent for glazing, building rich, luminous layers over an existing underpainting.

Permanent Alizarin Crimson is a modern, lightfast alternative to genuine Alizarin Crimson, which is prone to fading over time. This version gives you the same deep, cool crimson character, formulated with more stable modern pigments so your work holds its colour for the long term.

Pair it with Dioxazine Purple for deep, rich violets, or mix it with Titanium White for cool, dusty pinks. Combined with Cadmium Deep Red Hue, it extends your red range from warm to cool, giving you far more flexibility when mixing skin tones, flowers, or drapery.

This colour reads noticeably cooler than most reds, which makes it especially useful in portrait and figure work. Where a warm red like Cadmium can push skin tones toward orange, Permanent Alizarin Crimson pulls them toward a more natural, cooler pink — particularly useful for capturing the subtle colour shifts in lips, cheeks, and shadowed skin.

In floral painting, it brings a rich, velvety depth to roses, peonies, and other deep-toned blooms that a warmer red simply can’t match. Thinned into a glaze, it can also be used to unify a painting’s colour temperature, laid thinly over cooler areas to tie them into a warmer overall palette without overpowering what’s underneath.

Because it’s such a strong, concentrated colour, a little goes further than you might expect — start with a small amount on your palette and build up gradually, rather than squeezing out more than you need.

The History of Permanent Alizarin Crimson

Alizarin Crimson’s story begins with madder, a red dye extracted from plant roots and used since ancient times, found in Egyptian tombs and referenced by Roman writers. In 1826, French chemists Jean-Jacques Colin and Pierre-Jean Robiquet identified the two colourants within madder root: alizarin and the less stable purpurin.

In 1868, German chemists Carl Gräbe and Carl Liebermann worked out how to synthesise alizarin directly, without needing the madder plant at all — one of the first times a natural dye had been successfully recreated in a laboratory. English chemist William Perkin discovered the same process independently around the same time, though the German patent was filed one day earlier. The synthetic version could be produced at a fraction of the cost of natural madder, and the market for the plant-based dye collapsed almost overnight.

Alizarin Crimson quickly became a favourite among painters for its rich, deep colour. However, it turned out to be less lightfast than hoped, fading noticeably when exposed to strong light over time — so much so that it’s since become a benchmark pigment used specifically to test how much light exposure a painting has had, by watching how far the colour has faded.

That’s where “Permanent” versions like this one come in. Rather than using genuine Alizarin Crimson, Permanent Alizarin Crimson is formulated with more modern, lightfast pigments engineered to closely match its distinctive cool crimson character, without the fading problem. It gives painters the colour they love, built to actually last.

Permanent Alizarin Crimson Oil Paint — Storage and Handling

Store the tube upright with the cap tightly closed, away from direct heat, and it can last several months of regular painting. Squeeze out only what you need for a session — paint left exposed on the palette starts to skin over within a day, though this varies with humidity.