Nature’s vibrant secrets

The rainbow of colours on a soap bubble, the blue flash on a jay bird’s wing or even the entrancing tones of a colour-shifting squid aren’t the kind of colours you can buy in a tin of paint. These colours don’t come from pigments, but from the very structures of the bubble, of the feather hairs and of the squid skin. So-called ‘structural colours’ have broadened and brightened nature’s colour palette for millions of years, and yet we are only just discovering how many of these colours are made. Armed with this knowledge, scientists could make colourful materials depending not on what the molecules are, but how they are arranged.