The main reason why purple is rarely found on national flags has to do with the fact that its production was incredibly expensive up until the mid-nineteenth century. To produce purple back then, you needed to obtain the dye from the sea snails that could be found only in a certain part of the Mediterranean, in the Tyre region, which is part of Lebanon today. Here are some curious facts about the making of purple in those times:

More than 10,000 sea snails were required to produce only 1 gram of purple dye.
The price of purple was higher than the price of gold of the same weight — it was actually worth around 3 pounds of gold.
According to the price edict declared by Roman Emperor Diocletian, a pound of purple dye was so costly that you had to pay the price of around 150,000 denarii, equivalent to $19,000 at the time of writing.

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