pigments Archives - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

April 26, 2023April 27, 2023

Eliminating Pigments in Paint

What if we could reduce environmental problems by eliminating pigments in paint? Creating colorful paint without pigments is possible by copying something found in the natural world. For example, butterflies, birds, fish, and cephalopods use structural color to create their dazzling beauty. Light, rather than pigments, creates structural color.

Debashis Chanda and colleagues at the University of Central Florida have researched eliminating pigments in paint by using structural color. Pigment colors are artificially synthesized molecules, requiring different chemicals for each color. Structural color involves producing a geometrical arrangement of two colorless materials to make any color of the rainbow.

Chandra’s work produces a plasmonic paint using nanoscale structural arrangements of aluminum and aluminum oxide, both of which are colorless. Structural color controls the reflection, scattering, or absorption of light based on the geometrical configuration of the nanostructures. The research has placed these structural color flakes in a commercial binder to produce all the colors visible to the human eye.

Unlike pigment color, structural color never fades. Another advantage is that it reflects infrared radiation, so the material under the paint can stay 25 to 30 degrees F cooler than with chemical paint. Also, plasmonic paint is lighter weight because it can produce saturated colors with a thinner paint layer. In addition, since the colors will not fade, there may not be a need to repaint as often. Finally, eliminating pigments in paint reduces chemical substances that can cause environmental impacts.

With these advantages, structural color plasmonic paint may be the paint of the future. Interestingly, structural color is another thing we learn from studying the natural world. Often the colors we see in living things come from structural color rather than pigments. This is one more example of the intelligence God built into the world. We continue to learn exciting new ways to improve people’s lives by mimicking what God has already done. Like velcro, penicillin, bird wings, and lizard lungs, we are blessed by copying God’s design.

References: National Science Foundation Reports and the journal Science Advances

September 8, 2022September 7, 2022

Structural Color in Plants

When you see a peacock with brilliant green in its feathers, realize that it has no green feathers. Its feathers are actually brown, but God has used a clever optical trick to make them look green to us. We call it structural color. Likewise, many butterflies have bright blue spots on their wings, but there are no blue pigments in a butterfly’s wings.

Some plants produce fruits that look blue to us without having any blue pigment in the fruits. The only plants known to produce blue fruits in this way are Viburnum tinus and Lantana strigocamara. You will not get a blue stain if you crush their berries in your fingers. On the other hand, if you crush a common blueberry, its blue pigments will stain your fingers.

When you see a blue pigment, it is blue because it absorbs all other colors while reflecting blue. Structural color uses microscopic pyramid-like structures that manipulate the light. Since blue light has higher energy than other colors, it escapes the structure. Structural color requires no pigments, and you might call it an optical illusion.

Color is essential in the natural world. For example, animals with color vision use colors to camouflage, attract others, or discern whether something is good to eat. The problem with using pigments to produce color is that the chemistry to get a particular color is quite complex, but structural color does not involve any chemistry.

People have used chemicals to produce the colors we see in our fabrics, but some colors can be costly and time-consuming to produce. God has created a chemical-free method to produce much of the beauty we see in the world around us. Beauty in structural color gives evidence of a wise Creator.

Reference: National Science Foundation Research News

October 6, 2020October 5, 2020

Colors of Fall and What they Mean

The beauty of autumn’s brilliant colors is an amazing testimony to the creative wisdom of God as well as an expression of His love of beauty. The colors of fall are caused by several pigments and the interaction of sunlight and sugar.

Most of us know that chlorophyll makes leaves green. When leaves receive reduced sunlight in the fall, they also have a reduced supply of nutrients and water, causing the chlorophyll to be removed. The chlorophyll masks two pigments that have different colors. Carotene is yellow, and several varieties of anthocyanins are red. Many leaves contain tannin, which is brown and is dominant in oak trees. Sunlight acting on trapped sugar also produces anthocyanins with various sparkling colors, which is why the color is so spectacular on a sunny autumn day in a maple forest.

As the days grow shorter, the reduced amount of sunlight causes a corky wall called the “abscission layer” to form between the twig and the leaf stalk. This wall will eventually break and cause the leaf to drop off in the breeze. The corky material seals off the vessels that supplied the leaf with nutrients and water and blocks any loss of sugars from the plant.

What is especially interesting is that the leaf colors are not all the same. Some vines produce spectacular colors. Poison ivy takes on a beautiful red due to a high concentration of anthocyanin. Aspen has a high concentration of carotene producing the vivid yellows which dominate the woods in the Rocky Mountains. In Michigan, we have maples, gum, aspen, and oak, giving us spectacular colors that vary from one location to another.

The colors of fall are a great testimony to the fact that God paid attention to aesthetics in the creation. If survival of the fittest were the only criteria for choosing the chemicals that allow plants to survive, it seems that there would be one best choice. Different chemicals provide a vivid, beautiful splash of color for humans to enjoy. Beauty is not part of the evolutionary model, but it speaks of God’s creativity, giving us a wonderful and beautiful world in which to live.