I’ll admit when I first saw this article about the lightest paint in the world from WIRED, I thought “oh god, another Anish Kapoor thing” but it wasn’t this time.
In a paper published this month in Science Advances, [Debashis] Chanda’s lab demonstrated a first-of-its-kind paint based on structural color. They think it’s the lightest paint in the world—and they mean that both in terms of weight and temperature. The paint consists of tiny aluminum flakes dotted with even tinier aluminum nanoparticles. A raisin’s worth of the stuff could cover both the front and back of a door. It’s lightweight enough to potentially cut fuel usage in planes and cars that are coated with it. It doesn’t trap heat from sunlight like pigments do, and its constituents are less toxic than paints made with heavy metals like cadmium and cobalt.
I’m all for environmentally friendly and cost-saving paints so I’ll be interested to see if this takes off (partial pun intended)
Paint related: Easy Klein is an ‘Incredibly Kleinish Blue’ paint for everyone to use