Scoring a color’s sexiness calls for a sketchy rubric at best: Although someone appointed it the color of romance and passion, red is also the color of blood and chaos (see: panic buttons, fire trucks). Sleek, sophisticated black does double duty as the uniform of death. Purple can communicate richness, royalty,…
What makes something red, or blue, or green? It’s all in the way light bounces off its surface. Something that primarily reflects light with shorter wavelengths will appear bluer, while something that reflects longer wavelengths will appear redder. By playing around with that principle, scientists have created a…
In the early 18th century, German chemist Johann Jacob Diesbach was at work in a laboratory trying to make a red pigment out of cochineal insects, the tiny bugs whose extract dyes everything from food to lipstick. Diesbach hypothesized that he could combine the carmine extract with alum, iron sulfate, and potash to…
Winter is here and though it hasn’t overstayed its welcome just yet (it will), it’s still no fun to have to wear so many darn layers. It’s much more fun to imagine the other (better) seasons. Beauty of Science made this very colorful video using footage taken from microscopes or macro shots—chemical reactions, paint…
There are two types of people in this world. People like Adam Hillman, an artist who sees colorful patterns and gradients in random objects, and the rest of us dull schmucks who just see Post-it notes, lollipops, and breakfast cereals without ever imagining them to be something else. Thankfully, Hillman is generous…
Wenting Zhu mixed together paint, alcohol, water, soda, and ink remover in weird combinations, stuck them under a microscope, and ended up with awesomely mesmerizing effects. Sometimes it’s beautiful and feels like you’re watching a kaleidoscope take focus, or seeing a star burst in a distant galaxy. Other times it…
You may not realize it as you’re watching a movie, but directors are manipulating how you feel by playing with certain colors in each scene. Here’s a compilation of how the psychology of color works in movies. For example, pink is often used to convey sweetness or femininity, while red is utilized for violence. Green…
Painting a wall is boring because it takes so much time and requires so much preparation to not get paint everywhere. But what if it could be exciting and done quickly and the point was to get paint everywhere? Like what if you blew up some paint buckets to see if the explosion of colors could paint a room?
I’m not quite sure how the logistics will work out but I now know that I don’t want regular candles for my future birthday cakes, I want melting glow sticks. They burn so bright and ooze out such spectacular alien colors and leave such a lovely fluorescent goo behind that normal candles can’t even compare anymore.…
We’ve seen the space oddity of mixing colors and paint together before. What makes this one especially fun to watch is the soothing sound of the liquids merging and the bubbles popping. It’s really easy to lose track of time when you’re watching the colors and shapes go by.
People who live in bedrooms with color schemes favored by seedy bachelors and Hot Topic-loving teens may have yet another reason to redecorate: bed bugs.
The whirlwind of colors comes in waves. The giant mixing bowl takes in all the colors of sprinkles and then starts spinning like a laundry machine to combine them. You can see the layers slowly merge together, blue crashes into white, pink merges with orange and yellow, until everything is evenly mixed and ready to…
There’s a moment, before all the crayons are melted and before it devolves into some sort of poisonous stew that people in the past had to eat because that’s all they had to eat, where some of the crayons have not melted and the crayons that have melted have not completely mixed together that this pan of melted…
Put paint and oil and milk and soap together and what do you get? A lot of pretty. Thomas Blanchard continues his series of mixing paint and shooting it up close to create worlds of emotion and beauty through color. What’s especially cool is how alive it all feels.
It’s flying colors! Paul Trillo’s Chromaticity cleverly choreographed four drones to fly across the sky and leave smoke of color against the backdrop of the endless ocean. The effect is pretty awesome to see because the smoke grenades cover the drone and make it seem as if it’s just a team of superheroes flying…
Surrey NanoSystems is famous for creating Vantablack, a material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 percent of visible light. That’s a lot. Things basically disappear when coated with the Vantablack carbon nanotubes. And yet, they’ve somehow made the material even blacker. Yes, the blackest black material has…
The rainbow bagel looks like a Willy Wonka creation crossed with used play doh set in a reality that I’m not quite prepared to live in. It exists at The Bagel Store in Brooklyn, New York and is topped with a schmear of Funfetti cream cheese made with cake mix and is something you can eat. Sure, it’s visually…
Skateboarding is already cool as it is. The counter culture, the youth, the loitering, the tricks, it’s not like you need to add more to it for it to be cooler. Beyond Slow Motion, however, threw in some spectacular colors by putting paint powder all over the skateboard and skate park and then had guys do tricks on…
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