This is the blue morpho butterfly, which has a cool alien-sounding name, but also has inspired a new biomimetic fabric that refracts light like the butterfly’s wings. It’s just one of the eco-friendly future fabrics.
According to the Biomimetic Design blog:
Morpho butterflies remain a vibrant blue throughout their lives, without ever needing a coat of paint to spruce up a dull finish. The scales on their wings are made of many layers of proteins that refract light in different ways, and the color we see often is due entirely to the play of light and structure rather than the presence of pigments.
The amazing fiber called Morphotex is the firs fiber material that realizes a mysterious color illuination with no pigmentation.
Huffington Post has a list of five eco-friendly fabrics of the future, including Morphotex, but also green rubber, nettles and “victimless leather” grown from skin cell lines. (Plus silver, which I have a really hard time believing is eco-friendly, since silver mining? Not exactly the most Gaia-loving process.)
