Arrange the stages by which a colour loses the meaning its scarcity gave it, in causal order.

1. Only one distant region supplies the raw material, so the supply is fixed and small
2. The pigment is priced by the ounce and written into the contract by value
3. A chemist finds a synthetic equivalent and the price collapses within a decade
4. The colour becomes available to anyone who wants it, at any scale
5. Whatever it used to signify has to be re-established on some other ground

The last stage is the one that gets left out of pigment histories. Once a colour is available to everyone it can no longer signify anything by being present, so the meaning has to be rebuilt out of quantity, placement or context, which is roughly the difference between a fifteenth-century mantle and a twentieth-century monochrome.