The Secret Lives of Color

Diverse Shades

The color black is often perceived as a singular hue, yet it encompasses a wide range of shades, much like white. Cassia St. Clair highlights the lack of vocabulary to describe these subtle variations, which she found frustrating when writing her book. Despite initial concerns about having little to say about black, she discovered a rich history and complexity in its shades.

It's a funny thing that if you go into a paint shop or a clothing store, you can find so many hundreds, thousands of variants of white, and we can call them cream or ivory or pearl, and we've got lots of different names for them, and yet we just sort of collapse so many subtle blacks into one very big, overarching label.

--- Cassia St. Clair

Roman Mars compares the excitement of discovering new colors like mauve and green to the awe of seeing vantablack, a substance that absorbs more light than any other material on Earth 1.

   

Vantablack Discovery

Vantablack, a groundbreaking material, was initially developed for satellite guidance systems to enhance image clarity by minimizing light reflection. Cassia St. Clair describes its eerie properties, noting how it absorbs 99.965% of visible light, creating an uncanny visual experience akin to a black hole. This extreme darkness led to bizarre reactions, with some associating it with evil due to its mysterious nature.

When I first saw a sample of vantablack, it was kind of grown onto a sample of a piece of crumpled up aluminium foil. And when you looked at the reverse, you could see all the different planes. You could see that it was a scrumpled piece, piece of aluminium foil from the different planes of light.

--- Cassia St. Clair

Roman Mars2 3.