A synthetic dye or coloring compound used in textiles and microscopy, related to safranine but with modified chemical structure.
From 'apo-' (away from, modified) + 'safranine' (a red dye derived from saffron-like coloring). Developed in the 19th century during the explosion of synthetic dye chemistry.
When chemists learned to make artificial dyes in the 1850s, they created hundreds of new colors by tweaking natural dyes—'aposafranine' is what you get when you remove part of a safranine molecule, and it stains things differently than the original.
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