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Somewhat-related... I just found out about "structural" coloration[1], which is "production of color by microscopically structured surfaces fine enough to interfere with visible light".

It took Lexus ~15 years to develop "structural blue", a colorless paint that creates blue light using this structural interference. The making-of video[2] is pretty amazing, and definitely worth watching.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_coloration

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JU541_zm2w




After learning about light interference creating the iridescence of butterflies and of CDs, I wondered whether you could burn a CD to control the structure of the CD to change that interference enough to, say, draw an iridescent image. However, it looks like the writeable elements of a CD are a too large. With a Bluray though, it might be possible... I haven't tried and I'm not entirely sure how you'd go about doing it.


LightScribe kind of does this though it's not iridescent. You can also find some free code to achieve a similar effect on the data side of a disk.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightScribe


For anyone who was curious: I found this instructable that includes MATLAB code to generate the data for the image to be burned to the data side of a CD. http://www.instructables.com/id/Burning-visible-images-onto-...

This was all I could really find, unfortunately...


Came here looking to see if someone had already posted about this. Not surprised someone else was aware of it.

This is absolutely worth a read, and the less than 5 minutes to watch the video.

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I'm not sure what the "Structural Blue Edition" cost (my guess is the range of $10K - $30K premium), but it's still far from the most expensive car paint jobs -- Porsche's "Liquid Metal Silver" for the 918 Spyder (created by BASF) was a $64,000 option (where the aluminum flakes arrange themselves in a specific way during application), yet there's been crazier stuff offered than that.


Makes you wonder if a structural red could be created. I would guess not, otherwise it would exist in nature. Here's the first search result of structural red: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/mystery-of-why-structura...


"Makes you wonder if a structural red could be created. I would guess not, otherwise it would exist in nature"

Moonstone sometimes exhibits red-orange coloration due to its structure of alternating layers of different types of feldspar. Opals do the same thing but by water-filled fractures inside a group of quartz spheres. We can synthesize both so making a structural red should not be difficult.


Quite amazing that such bright color "appears" from colorless ingredients!




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