University of Oxford’s zoologist, artist, and inventor Andrew Parker believes that color isn’t just a ‘thing.’ As he sees it, colors come from materials arranged into crystalline nanostructures. They scatter light and create so-called structural colors. Once the pigment industry, presently worth over $36 billion, realizes it, humanity will be able to create hues and pigments that are far richer than everything we’ve ever seen before.
First Documentations of the Structural Color
The phenomenon of structural color was first documented in the 17th century by scientists who observed peacock feathers. Only when the electron microscope was invented in the 1930s, however, researchers began to realize how it works. As it turns out, structural colors and pigments aren’t the same things. Pigments are molecules that absorb light, though the wavelengths corresponding to visible colors are scattered.
On the contrary, structural colors have intricate nanoscale architectures. Some of them are not much bigger than a single atom. Those structures don’t absorb light at all and reflect it differently than pigments, i.e., colors are reflected in particular wavelengths. That’s why the result isn’t the same as with pigmented colors.
Interestingly enough, nature is abundant in structural colors, just as in pigments. For example, optical structures in the feathers of peacocks cause iridescent color. While they’re pigmented in brown, their stunning hues come from their photonic crystalline nanostructures. It’s not just in peacocks, either. That led to many researchers, along with Parker, posing the question of whether or not we can replicate those structures and create structural colors.
Parker’s Underwater Discoveries
In the 1990s, when Parker was an art student at the University of Sydney, he spent a good deal of his time with a dive mask, studying marine life. When twilight came, he saw how ‘pigmented’ animals would fade, and iridescent ones would still be visible. He wondered why.
So, for more than 20 years, Parker worked tirelessly to create a method of replicating the nanostructures of structural color in a laboratory. He believes the brightest hues and pigments come from transparent materials and was determined to succeed in his endeavor. He considers that achieving his goal of replicating nanostructures in structural colors will benefit humanity in more than one way. After all, some of the pigments we use today are mined from the earth, and many of them are highly toxic.
While there’s still much work to be done, Parker and his team of scientists believe they might have cracked the code of the structural color. Only time will tell if he’s right, though. Until then, we’ll have to put up with the not-to-unique pigments we’re used to.