The Perfect Red sounds like an interesting book, and here's a review of it from the Washington Post:
One day, Amy Butler Greenfield was sitting in a library in Seville, Spain, perusing the cargo manifests of ships of the colonial era, when she noticed how often cochineal was mentioned. Why were the Spanish shipping so much of this special red dyestuff from Mexico? Intrigued by its apparent value, she decided to unearth its history. That Greenfield also comes from a family of dyers made the scholarly detective work all the more appealing to her.
The result, A Perfect Red, is a fascinating history of dyeing, as craft and culture, focusing on the social and economic importance of shades of red, the most vibrant of which were reserved for royalty. In the days before synthetic colors, some red dye came from plant sources such as henna or madder and some from insects such as Laccifer lacca (the latter was ideal for lacquering or shellacking wood). But competitive dyers sought "a perfect red," by which they meant a profitable one -- a dye that was stable, easily absorbed by fabric and resistant to fading. [continue]
Link found at Arts and Letters Daily.
The book:
A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire - amazon.ca
Related links:
Cochineal - wikipedia
Cochineal - answers.com