Direct Color

So, let’s talk about the shooting-bright-color-into-the-eyeball thing

In 1856, 18-year-old research assistant William Henry Perkin was tasked with creating a synthetic form of the malaria treatment quinine, but he made a mistake. As is often the case with mistakes in chemistry, he just stumbled into something else instead—turns out, coal tar makes an excellent base for synthetic dye. It became the basis for much of our color discovery for the next century—and points at the fact that many synthetic colors come from coal or petroleum byproducts.

One presumes that the researchers, largely from the University of California, Berkeley, were not making mistakes like that when they were doing laser treatments on the retinas of human subjects. Their hook is that they invented this new ultra-rich green-blue color, which they explicitly compared to The Wizard of Oz’s Emerald City. But the intro of their scientific paper makes clear that they are trying for something much more impressive and dramatic:

We introduce a new principle for displaying color, which we call Oz: optically stimulating individual photoreceptor cells on the retina at population scale to directly control their activation levels. In principle, arbitrary colored visual imagery can be displayed by this cell-by-cell approach, but doing so requires exquisite precision in reproducing the dynamic stimulation levels at each photoreceptor as imagery traverses the retina under eye movement.

Essentially, they have created a way to shoot extremely rich images directly into your eyeballs. This, per the study, theoretically “enables display of colors that lie beyond the well-known, bounded color gamut of natural human vision.” Which is to say that when you get up close, you can tweak your photoreceptor cells precisely. One could imagine a laser-enabled VR headset being made that somehow tops the visual quality of real life images.

But there is a reason that the color they’re promoting this technology with is green and not red. Turns out, the three types of photoreceptor “cone” cells in your retina—which respectively emphasize red, green, and blue light—have a limitation: Most light that enables the green “M” cones also enables the red “L” cones, which limits how much green light can get through.

“There’s no wavelength in the world that can stimulate only the M cone,” UC Berkeley’s Ren Ng explained in a news release. “I began wondering what it would look like if you could just stimulate all the M cone cells. Would it be like the greenest green you’ve ever seen?”

Combined with the addition of a rapid-scanning laser beam that can target specific photoreceptors, the researchers then targeted the green cells exactly, using the laser test on themselves.

The result they saw was the color “olo,” an aggressive pure hue of teal so saturated and exacting that the human eye is basically incapable of seeing it except in extreme situations. (Admit it, me writing about “olo” is probably not doing it justice.)

The ultimate goal of this research, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, is to study eye disease. Ultimately, some of this research could be used to treat issues like color blindness, or maybe even expand our existing vision capabilities.

Presumably, along the way, they might even invent a few more colors.

The nice thing about this is that it creates the possibility that we’re about to see a bunch of new colors emerge after years of relative stagnation. Computers sort of spoiled us to the point where new color discoveries are rare. But your laptop cannot fit inside your eyeball—and your eyes are the ultimate decider of what colors you see.

William Henry Perkin’s accidental discovery 170 years ago drove numerous new color discoveries over roughly 100 years. It helped make fashion more vibrant and breakfast cereal more interesting. It made a rainbow of colors more accessible to the average person. While we can’t use lasers in our retinas to make breakfast cereal better, there’s a chance it could lead to better technology that ultimately reaches our eyeballs.

That time when the Lincoln Motor Company studied birds under a microscope with a museum’s help

The idea that someone can just find a color they like in a palette on a monitor is the aberration.

These days, the hunt for the perfect color is as simple as opening up a copy of Photoshop and clicking on a color. But it wasn’t always this way. It once required more work—a lot more work.

In researching this, I stumbled upon an attempt to uncover new colors—and the result might be the greatest example of public-private content marketing I’ve ever seen. See, in the mid-1920s, the Lincoln Motor Company was just getting off the ground—and its founding was drama-riffic.

Its founder, Henry M. Leland, had previously developed the luxury Cadillac brand, which he left after a dispute with General Motors over building machinery during World War I. (Leland wanted to build aircraft engines, but GM’s founder was a pacifist.) Focused on war production during World War I, it eventually became a car company—and was quickly scooped up by Ford. That was a wholly ironic acquisition, given that Cadillac was a rebranded version of Henry Ford’s first car company—especially given that Lincoln became Cadillac’s biggest competitor.

Anyway, Lincoln needed a way to highlight how its vehicles screamed luxury, and one way it did that was by publishing a fancy magazine, which it called The Lincoln. (A classic example of a magalog, by the way.) Another thing they did was show off their vehicles in fancy automotive salons, rather than at trade shows. They really wanted to fancy it up.

And that leads us to perhaps the most brilliant example of content marketing ever made: Lincoln’s car designers went to New York’s American Museum of Natural History and studied the many taxidermied birds in its collection. It took microscope samples of bird feathers and analyzed them. And then they wrote about it in The Lincoln, which is thankfully archived on Google Books:

Early last spring the Research Department of the Lincoln Motor Company made a careful study of birds in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History. A number of museum specimens were chosen from those birds having the loveliest plumage and striking color contrasts, and inasmuch as they were museum specimens and had never been exposed to the light, their colors were absolutely true.

The Ditzler Color Company, who are manufacturers of paint, were interested in the idea and spent many months in development work endeavoring to match exactly on paint panels the colors that had been chosen from the twelve birds. Eventually this was accomplished and not only were new colors discovered, but the birds suggested new ideas in the grouping of the colors. Nature has put colors together that man would ordinarily never dare, and needless to say Nature has done a most excellent job. The idea of contrast has been carried out not only in the colors selected for the exteriors of the Lincolns shown at the Salon, but also the tone for the interiors was taken from the same bird.

The effect is most unusual. While there is nothing freakish or bizarre about these cars, it has been predicted by those who are acquainted with the program that this group will be the most outstanding in any of the shows this year.

The dozen selections they came up with reflect the color pairings of a creative mind. There’s a car designed to look like a Brazilian Oriole, and another like a Haitian Lizard Cuckoo, and numerous other vehicles. The museum’s associate curator of birds, W. De W. Miler, wrote that many bird varieties had inspired prior developers previously.

The growing collections of the American Museum of Natural History, now among the largest in the world, offer unlimited material for the pursuit of this fascinating study. Artists and sculptors have long made use of the collections, and new uses are being discovered. Silk manufacturers have successfully imitated the patterns of the Golden Pheasant, the Loon and other species, the makers of woolen fabrics have copied many of the rarer shades, and now for the first time the builders of motor cars have achieved the unique in color schemes of surpassing and unique beauty by studying the plumage of the fowls of the air.

Simply put, it turned into an excellent design exercise, along with a clever way to take advantage of a museum’s resources.

As the lamented blog The Consumerist notes, these Lincoln vehicles came about during an era when automobile makers seemed willing to offer vehicle colors that stood out, introducing new approaches such as chrome trim and metallic paint (made from literal fish—reportedly, tens of thousands of them per vehicle—at first). But as trends started to move in more simplistic directions in the modern era, automakers responded by going as neutral as possible. The Consumerist blames Apple, but it doesn’t feel like the whole story, given that it’s been like this for at least 20 years.

Now, all of our vehicles just look like samey SUVs.

The problem with some colors is that they become impossible to source

If you’re a fine artist that dabbles in paint, it is probable that you’ve experienced this situation: After years of relying on a certain hue of color, the manufacturer that makes the color discontinues it. Suddenly, you’re scrambling for an equivalent, and the best you can do is mix other colors in a very specific way.

Not exactly fun, but it keeps happening. The reason, simply put, is that the source material of a given pigment—often in very short supply—runs out, preventing the manufacturer from making more. Sometimes they can work around it by mixing multiple common colors together, but sometimes there’s just no option.

A good example of this is located on the website for the artist paint provider Golden Artist Colors, which has a list of different discontinued pigments, often due to a lack of supply. Some colors can be brought back to life via reformulation with other colors—some can’t.

See, we source paint colors from all over—we don’t just keep reusing the same base materials to make different hues. If we run out of a consistent supply of a given mineral, for example, or that mineral becomes cost-prohibitive to use in a pigment, suddenly it might be impossible to mass-produce that color. And colors can run into supply chain challenges as well—a few years ago, just before YInMn Blue hit the market, there was a shortage of the color blue.

As the paint provider Blick notes, it’s a surprisingly common situation that could leave your favorite paint high and dry. And it may simply be a side effect of suppliers that can’t facilitate demand because someone else needs the material more.

“Today pigments often disappear because the single manufacturer who makes them ceases production,” the company states on its website. “Not many are made exclusively for art materials. Most can also be used in other paints and plastics, making them more profitable.”

The plus side: They typically know when these supply issues could emerge, giving them time to come up with potential replacements. But still, if you rely on a specific color, you might want to stock up and do what you can to protect it from the elements. Even if you’re not storing liquid paint, pigments you might keep aside for your watercolors can face mold problems.

I guess one nice thing about having colors directly shot into your retinas with a laser: You don’t have to worry about losing access to your color supply.