Natural colorants from plants for wellness industry

Abstract

Colorants are widely used in food, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, nutraceutical and textile industry to improve customer perception and acceptability. The hazardous effects and legislation of synthetic dyes minimize its applications thus the search for natural pigments is in trend. Plant natural pigments are widely used as alternative not only because of their high availability as colouring agent, but also they exhibits abundance of health-promoting values such as antioxidant and antimicrobial activity which favour human beings. Drawbacks of natural pigments including its stability and cost hindered its popularity in industry but the emerging of modern technologies is expected to overcome this problems. This review focuses on the natural colorant from plants source, production technologies and their implication in wellness industry; i.e. food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical.