Love Letters in Crayon: Bluetiful
A serendipitously synthesized shade of Earth's favorite color.
Every Friday afternoon, “64 to Infinity: Love Letters in Crayon” will illustrate the long, strange story of humankind in one of the 64 colors that make up this world-famous primary palette. After a dive into the deep significance of Blue last week, we admire an instance of accidental genius in the series by studying a shade known in this color canon as “Bluetiful,” but much more seriously regarded in the scientific community.
There's no getting around the fact that "Bluetiful" is a stupendously silly name for a shade, but when you have as much juice as Big Crayon does, you often get to color outside the lines a bit.
The wide-eyed engagement of a crayon in hand befits a colorful term like “Bluetiful.”
Introduced to The 64 in 2017, this newest addition to the leading legacy of color is inspired by YinMn Blue, an inorganic pigment discovered by professor Mas Subramanian and graduate student Andrew E. Smith at Oregon State University less than 10 years before the publishing of this book.
Like many of our kind's finest offerings, YinMn Blue was discovered entirely by accident.
The duo was attempting to synthesize a multiferroic material, the metallic substances prized for their unique magnetic properties and studied carefully in fields such as cosmology and particle physics to win fleeting glimpses into how The Universe is built and how it came to be.
Failing at this most serious pursuit, what these Men of Science discovered instead was the YinMn compound, the first new blue pigment identified in over 200 years.
Non-toxic and highly resistant to fading, they immediately saw its potential as a pigment, and soon after filed a patent for the shade under its scientific honorific.
By any name, Bluetiful showcases extraordinary depth and richness, perfectly complementing the tone of its backstory.
Its origins in unexpected delight make it perhaps the characteristic hue of serendipity itself, and now you see why I am obsessed with this color.
I love a good accidental origin story…so much so, in fact, that next week’s Love Letter is also dedicated to positive permutations. Blue-Green is next up in our aesthetic alphabet, and the story of this color goes back far further than a decade…join us next week as we travel through time to draw exciting conclusions about the genesis of life on The Planet!
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