Making colour
Vantablack and the blackest blacks
Coatings made of microscopic carbon tubes absorb more than 99.9 per cent of light. Objects coated in them look like flat holes.
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Ordinary black paint reflects a few per cent of the light that hits it, which is why you can still see folds in black cloth. Since 2014 a group of engineered coatings has pushed far beyond that. Vantablack, the best known, absorbs up to 99.965 per cent of visible light. A crumpled sheet coated in it looks like a flat black shape cut out of the world.
How it works
Vantablack is not a paint in the normal sense. It is a layer of carbon nanotubes, hollow tubes of carbon thousands of times thinner than a hair, grown standing upright and close together like a dense forest. Light that enters is bounced between the tubes and absorbed before it can escape. The name comes from vertically aligned nanotube arrays. The British company Surrey NanoSystems announced it in 2014. It was designed for science and engineering, where stray reflections inside telescopes, cameras and sensors spoil measurements.
The art dispute
In 2016 the sculptor Anish Kapoor, who was born in Mumbai and works in London, obtained exclusive rights to use a sprayable form of Vantablack in art. Other artists objected to one person holding a colour. The British artist Stuart Semple replied by selling a very bright pink pigment to anyone who declared they were not Anish Kapoor, and went on to develop very black acrylic paints that anyone can buy. A Japanese maker sells another, called Musou Black. These paints absorb somewhat less light than nanotube coatings but can be brushed on at home.
Blacker still
In 2019 engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported a nanotube material grown on aluminium foil that captured at least 99.995 per cent of incoming light, found while they were working on something else. Nature arrived first by another route. Some birds of paradise and peacock spiders have feathers and scales with microscopic structures that trap light, giving a black that makes neighbouring colours look brighter. For everyday use, the oldest black pigment of all, carbon from soot and charred wood or bone, still colours most inks, tyres and paints.
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Sources and further reading
- Vantablack on Wikipedia
- MIT News: MIT engineers develop blackest black material to date
- Surrey NanoSystems: Vantablack
- The Guardian: Anish Kapoor on his exclusive rights to the 'blackest black'
- Wired: The Pinkest Pink Versus the Blackest Black
Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.