Grey & Charcoal Rugs
Grey is a recent taste in hand-knotted rugs, and the honest way to put it is that there is almost no such thing as an antique grey Persian rug. Where grey appears in old weaving it is undyed fleece, or a faded blue, or a brown that has gone cool. Almost everything sold as a grey rug today was woven in the last thirty years for a market that asked for it.
Why the old rugs are not grey
A traditional dyer had madder, indigo, the plant yellows, walnut and tannin. None of them makes grey. True black needed iron, and iron corrodes the pile, so weavers used it sparingly and mostly for outlines. What looks grey in an old rug is generally one of three things: undyed grey or salt-and-pepper fleece, an indigo that has been dipped once and then faded, or a corroded brown. Asking for a hundred-year-old grey rug is asking for something the dye cupboard could not supply.
The three sources of grey today
First, undyed grey wool, which is genuine and appears in Gabbeh and other tribal weaving and in flat weaves. Second, new production dyed to order: modern and transitional designs, Tibetan and Nepalese weaving, and grey-palette Ziegler and Chobi rugs, all of which are honest work made in a grey palette. Third, and worth being careful about, older rugs that have been chemically stripped and overdyed to a flat grey. That process is a wash with bleach in it, and it costs the wool some of its life.
How to tell a stripped rug
Look at the back and the base of the pile. An overdyed rug shows the original colour where the knot meets the foundation, and the fringe often stays a different shade from everything else. The pile feels drier than it should and the design tends to be ghostly rather than drawn, because a pattern built for contrast has had its contrast removed. These rugs have a place and they are not frauds when described accurately, but they are not antique grey rugs, and they will not wear like a new rug woven grey from the start.
Living with it
Charcoal hides soil almost as well as brown and reads far cooler. Light grey has the same problem as ivory and shows every footprint. Grey in wool holds up; grey in a soft, low-twist yarn will mat and start to look grubby in a year of real traffic.
