What's in a Color?

Humans have been searching for the perfect shade of red since the Stone Age, when our ancestors ground up ochre to create a deep, earthy hue. Thousands of years later, we still haven’t found it.

Red is an inherently imperfect pigment. It can be bright but toxic, or dull but safe; it can shine brightly then fade quickly, or last thousands of years but lack brilliance. All of the world’s known red pigments come with tradeoffs, which is why scientists are hard at work to find one that doesn’t.

“We’ve been looking for a brilliant, stable red,” says Mas Subramanian, a chemist at Oregon State University, who is best known for discovering YInMn, the dazzling shade of blue derived from the elements yttrium, indium oxide, and manganese. Subramanian and his students have spent the last few years searching for a new red pigment—one that’s bold, long-lasting, non-toxic, and hopefully worth buckets of money.

It’s strange to think of colors as sellable products, but that’s exactly what they are. High performance pigments like YInMn can be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars in revenue. By one estimation, the pigment industry will be valued at $31.9 billion by the end of 2023—and that’s without a perfect red.

A new high performance red pigment could add to that number significantly. The most valuable shade on the market today—Red 254, also known as “Ferrari red”—is worth an estimated $300 million annually according to Bloomberg Businessweek, and it’s still vulnerable to fading.

Truly new colors are rare. They aren’t so much discovered as they are meticulously willed into existence though the scientific process. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it,” Subramanian says. So far, Subramanian’s experiments have yielded a sunny yellow, a deep orange, and a burnt copper hue. A true red could be one experiment or many years away—that’s the nature of research. “We’re still not quite there,” he says. “But we’re getting closer.”