So you´ve always wondered what the Dorian Gray story was all about but also wanted to find out if somebody had an answer to it´s mystery. Why is it such a mysterious story and why did that painting collapse? Here is why. The painter who painted Dorian Gray´s picture used safflower oil to cause the painting to break up, becoming a disaster so that Dorian Gray would think that this was a picture of his soul. The painter then relied upon that flies would lay eggs in the oil in the painting so Dorian gray would think it was a message from Satan. See? The painter was the guy who ran the whole Dorian Gray shebang. As Dorian kept growing old while refusing to admit he´s really old everyone around him participated in his madness until he finally saw the truth. By then the safflower oil had broken apart and the painting looked like a nightmarish spider web. It´s also probable that the painter decided to paint a skeleton for a background so he could record Dorian Gray´s facial features.Safflower oil can be scary when you know how to use it to deceive the right targets...the ones who haven´t researched it.

Dorian hadn´t and most people in the party he had been invited to hadn´t either. Because the painting wasn´t overpainted it kept becoming darker and darker and more and more lifeless with Dorian thinking it was all because of his sins when it was in fact because of science. Now we know the terrifying truth about what safflower oil can do to viewers of paintings painted with impressionist colors if they aren´t careful and don´t do their homework. And remember that scene which terrified Dorian so much in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when he saw the skeleton of himself in the picture? That was a hypothesis on how the painter might have conceived of using the skeleton as the basis for later oil color layers to be added. He knew the transparent nature of oil and what happens when you use a combination of different oils at the same time or even deliberately decide to crack up your painting. He envied Dorian and this is how he treated him...