A ONCE-IN-A-BLUE-MOON DISCOVERY
Oregon lab’s new shade is rare inorganic find, and it’s gaining a following
Blue is a color that has deep cultural cachet, while being nearly impossible to find in nature. The blues that abound in nature — a butterfly, a navy beetle, even blue eyes — are not natively blue, according to scientists, but instead are reflections of light, the impression of blue.
Since antiquity, blue has been associated with rarity and expense; ultramarine — a pigment originally made from grinding lapis lazuli, a semiprecious gemstone found in Afghan mines — was once worth as much as gold.
Today, our blues are created by chemists in labs. But that doesn’t mean creating new shades is easy or common.
Before 2009, when a team of chemists at Oregon State University developed a color now known as YInMn Blue (quite unexpectedly), it had been 200 years since the last inorganic blue pigment was created. (That one was cobalt, whose chemical composition was discovered by French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard in 1802.)
Now, YInMn Blue is available to artists as a paint and for commercial use. (The Environmental Protection Agency approved it for industrial coatings and plastics in 2017.) It has a home in the archive of the Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard University, and has even inspired an addition to the spectrum of Crayola crayons — a striking shade called “Bluetiful.”
A star is born
The shade was invented by Mas Subramanian, a professor of materials science at Oregon State University, who was working with a team of graduate students to develop an inorganic material that could be used for electronic devices. When a sample he had put in the furnace came out a vivid, vibrant hue of ultramarine, Subramanian said he immediately realized “the brilliant, very intense blues” were like nothing he had seen before, and would be better suited to use in paint than on pieces of technology.
The blue proved stable, but it could also be slightly altered to get variations in hue. “We decided ‘OK, this is interesting for the pigment industry,’ ” Subramanian said.
The name for the new blue is
derived from its chemical components’ symbols on the periodic table of elements: yttrium, indium and manganese.
The beauty of YInMn Blue is that it is not only able to be widely duplicated via Subramanian’s formula, but is also nontoxic, making it safer to use — and perhaps more eco-friendly too.
Cobalt, on the other hand —
though a boon for 19th-century artists who had previously relied on pigments cultivated from rare, cost-prohibitive gemstones like lapis lazuli — turned out to be extremely toxic.
Previous pigments
The Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums houses more than 2,500 pigments;
YInMn Blue has recently been added and was prominently featured in a small display. Narayan Khandekar, a senior conservation scientist and director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums, has been following the development of this pigment for years and requested some of the earliest YInMn samples to add to the collection.
Subramanian’s blue also made it into the collection because it is a rare example of a wholly modern pigment, in contrast to the many pigments from the Middle Ages that are housed in the collection.
“It’s kind of an amazing thing that he was able to just look at something that was an accident. And then recognize how it could be applied to something that he had no experience with whatsoever,” Khandekar said of Subramanian. “You’ve got synthetic ultramarine, which came along in 1826, but that was synthesizing an already known pigment.”
“This is a very special discovery because this is the first time my discovery has reached to the society with so much diversity — artists, architects, the fashion industry, even the cosmetics industry,” Subramanian aid. “I never would have imagined my discovery would go this far.”