Butterflies Inspire Paint Pigment Alternative

A researcher from the University of Central Florida reportedly drew inspiration from butterflies to create what he says is the first environmentally friendly, multicolor alternative to pigment-based colorants.

The research team developed a bio-inspired plasmonic paint, which utilizes nanoscale structural arrangement of colorless materials such as aluminum and aluminum oxide instead of pigments to create colors.

Pigment colorants can control light absorption based on the electronic property of the pigment material, requiring every color to need a new molecule. However, structural colorants control the way light is reflected, scattered or absorbed based purely on the geometrical arrangement of nanostructures. Combining these structural color flakes with a commercial binder forms a long-lasting paint in various colors. Once researchers paint something with structural color, it should stay for centuries. The paint is also the “lightest paint in the world,” due to the paint’s large area-to-thickness ratio.

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