In 1856, William Henry Perkin, then age 18, was given a challenge by his professor, August Wilhelm von Hofmann, to synthesize quinine.  In one attempt, Perkin oxidized aniline using potassium dichromate, whose toluidine impurities reacted with the aniline and yielded a black solid, suggesting a "failed" organic synthesis. Cleaning the flask with alcohol, Perkin noticed purple portions of the solution.
Suitable as a dye of silk and other textiles, it was patented by Perkin, who the next year opened a dyeworks mass-producing it at Greenford on the banks of the Grand Union Canal in  Middlesex. It was originally called aniline purple. In 1859, it was named mauve in England via the French name for the mallow flower, and chemists later called it mauveine. Between 1859 and 1861, mauve became a fashion must have. The weekly journal All the Year Round described women wearing the colour as "all flying countryward, like so many migrating birds of purple paradise". Punch magazine published cartoons poking fun at the huge popularity of the colour “The Mauve Measles are spreading to so serious an extent that it is high time to consider by what means [they] may be checked.”
By 1870, demand succumbed to newer synthetic colors in the synthetic dye industry launched by mauveine.
In the early 20th century, the U.S. National Association of Confectioners permitted mauveine as a food coloring with a variety of equivalent names: rosolan, violet paste, chrome violet, anilin violet, anilin purple, Perkins violet, indisin, phenamin, purpurin and lydin'.
Laborers in the aniline dye industry were later found to be at increased risk of bladder cancer, specifically transitional cell carcinoma, yet by the 1950s, the synthetic dye industry had helped transform medicine, including cancer treatment.