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Where do colors come from when there is no pigment?

Additive ManufacturingBiomimetic MaterialsOptics and PhotonicsStructural Color

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Color Without Pigment

Answer in brief

Structural color comes from small patterns that select which wavelengths of light are reflected, scattered, or canceled. Pigments can still help: in many biological and engineered systems they absorb stray light while the structure supplies the hue.

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Sources that address it

  1. Biomimetic Omnidirectional Anti-reflective Glass via Direct Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuringpreprint
  2. Biomimetic isotropic nanostructures for structural colorationpreprint
  3. Efficient structural color from pigment-loaded nanostructurespreprint
  4. Fabrication and characterization of Fused Deposition Modeling 3D printed mm-scaled metasurfacespreprint
  5. Multiscale reduced-order modeling of fused filament fabricated compositespreprint
  6. Self-assembly of silica colloidal crystal thin films with tuneable structural coloursweb
  7. Sensitivity increase of 3D printed, self-sensing, carbon fibers structures with conductive filament matrixpreprint
  8. Solution-processed structural colors and their applicationsweb

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