Deep Purple
Grape Ape. Purple Haze. Granddaddy Purple. While all these delicious cannabis strains are tasty and intoxicating, they’re best known for their distinctive vibrant purple hues.
In case you weren’t aware, weed is usually green. I remember my dealer telling me about purple weed for the first time waaaaay back in the ’90s and thinking to myself, “This lady is high on more than pot.” But sure enough, when a few nugs were tapped out from a film canister, they were as purple as Prince’s guitar. They were also very stinky, and we got very stoned when we smoked it. I immediately locked the color and scent together in my mind with the great high. Purple leaves became a notorious trait I would shell out extra bucks to obtain, their rarity ensuring their popularity.
But what makes weed purple? And is it always a stronger high? Over the years, growers have traded in a variety of tales about how to produce purple buds. Many rumors revolve around changing the plants’ food, water, or light cycles. But most growers these days insist that you’ll do more harm to a plant than good in the pursuit of purple, and that any change in the color produced through these methods is because the plant is not healthy.
The colors of cannabis are created by chemicals called flavonoids. The word comes from the Latin flavus, which means yellow. Despite how the word sounds, flavonoids affect how a plant looks, not tastes. There are over 6,000 known flavonoids. Chlorophyll is one, and it creates the green found in plants. Purple is determined by the flavonoid anthocyanin. Other colors come from other flavonoids.
Read more: http://www.seattleweekly.com/food/deep-purple/
Illustration by James the Stanton