Stamp Colors Re Carmine & Lake

I am relatively new to this hobby, but something that has me a little baffled is the difference between 'lake', and 'carmine'. Is there a guide to turn to?
Secondly, I have recently acquired a stamp that appears to be a 3c Washington circa 1908. Difficult to tell because it is completely reversed, and extremely light in color. Thoughts?
Thanks for any feedback!
RGill


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carmine is more common than lake in general for US stamps
lake is darker than carmine
I know this isn't much help

"Lake" comes from the lac bug........

Thanks Rod, I never knew that about lake. You learn something every day!

Bobby,
stemmed from my curiosity about 2 colours, Ultramarine and Lake,
How could Lake be Red ? I mused.

and Ultramarine.........?
The name comes from the Latin ultramarinus, literally "beyond the sea", because the pigment was imported into Europe from mines in Afghanistan by Italian traders during the 14th and 15th centuries.

Lake has overtones (undertones?) of purple.

I actually think that it refers to the laking process which produced the red ink.

Later, I will show an interesting feature of the 219D.

Well then, we disagree.

The term "lake" is derived from the term lac, the secretions of the Indian wood insect Laccifer lacca (formerly known as the Coccus lacca). It has the same root as the word lacquer, and comes originally from the Hindi word lakh, through the Arabic word lakk and the Persian word lak.

Sometimes context makes all the difference.

The reason I even bothered to post in this thread was because I thought that rod222's post may have left the OP thinking the "lake" designation is all about color. In the case of the 219D and perhaps the later issues as well, the lake is referring to the laking process for making the printing inks. The inks are different. Shown below is a back scan of a 219D on the left and a 219 on the right. It seems that you can count on the 219D to always have setoff on the back of the stamp. The ink must have been very slow drying or somewhat sticky. Hopefully somebody finds this interesting. It doesn't take much for me :)

Holy smokes... I never noticed that. But sure enough I just flipped over a dozen 219D stamps and everyone has "setoff"!!

Shellac comes from the feces of the lac bug. It comes in a amber colored, thin discs that is mixed with boiled linseed oil to become shellac. I doubt they have anything to do with inks.

It seems I may be in error,
I took it to be the base pigment / dye taken from the lac bug, in discussions perhaps 5 years ago, on a stamp forum.

My apologies if I have passed on misinformation.

I still have trouble getting my head around it,
The video on Lake Pigments was a heads up,
still taken from a bug, the colour we know as "Lake" is/was cochineal?

2 videos

Dye from the Lac bug.

Philately: used in the Indian sealing wax colour.

Source of "Indian Lake"

Origin and History
From ancient times, lac dye has been employed in India as a skin cosmetic and for the dyeing of wool and silk, while China has a tradition of usage for leather dyeing. The bright red colorant gave a lightfast tint to silk and wool. It is similar in color to dyes obtained from cochineal and kermes. The color of the dye can be modified by the choice of mordant from violet to red and brown. The use of the lac dye can be traced back to 250 AD when it was mentioned by Claudius Aelianus, a Roman writer on a volume about natural history. This dye remained a valuable commodity until the late 19th century, when Perkins an English Chemist synthesized the first chemical aniline dyes, which killed the natural dye industry. The pigment made from lac dye, Indian Lake, was listed by Winsor & Newton in their 1896 catalogue.

Source
Lac dye is a deep red colorant extracted from the crude shellac resin excreted by the lac insect, Laccifer (Tachardia) lacca (formerly Coccus lacca), indigenous to southeast Asia. The lac insect is most often found on banyan trees (Ficus benghalensis, or F. indica) and on juniper trees (Rhamnus jujuba). The dye develops in a resinous cocoon, known as "sticklac" on the twigs of over 160 host trees in an arc from northern India through to Southeast Asia. The dyestuff is obtained by aqueous extraction of sticklac; a byproduct of shellac production. The operation involves crushing the sticklac and extraction several times with water; insects and other debris are removed also at this stage. The dyestuff is obtained as a precipitate on acidification of the aqueous extract. The resinous residue is further processed to "seedlac" and then to the fully-refined "shellac."

The water-soluble dyestuff, lac dye, is composed of of laccaic acid, mainly in the form of ammonium salts. These pigments are present at up to 10% in sticklac that has been harvested before adult insects depart their cocoon. Processed seedlac and shellac have a low content of laccaic acids but retain a yellow water-insoluble pigment, erythrolaccin.
Lac dye is precipitated with alumina to make Indian Lake pigment before it can be used in painting.

Cochineal!! Now there's a word that I haven't seen in several decades. I think I last saw it in an Emily Dickinson poem titled "The Early Morning Mail". But I could have the title wrong ... this was in the mid 60s. As I recall, in the poem it referred to the color of a hummingbird's gorget.