Vantablack and the blackest blacks
A forest of carbon nanotubes that swallows 99.965% of light, and an art-world feud over who may use it.
- Made from
- Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes
- Absorbs
- Up to 99.965% of visible light
- Art rights
- Exclusive to Anish Kapoor since 2016
Vantablack is not a paint in the usual sense. The original was a coating of carbon nanotubes grown standing up like a microscopic forest; the name means 'vertically aligned nanotube arrays' plus black. Light that enters bounces between the tubes until it's absorbed as heat. Surrey NanoSystems in England unveiled it in July 2014, and it absorbs up to 99.965% of visible light hitting it head on.
Coat a crumpled sheet or a sculpted face in it and the shape vanishes: the eye sees a flat hole, because there's almost no reflected light to show shading, the light-and-dark value the eye reads as form. That's the point for its main users, telescope and camera makers, who need to kill stray light. Spray-on versions followed, and in 2019 MIT engineers made a material reflecting a tenth as much light as Vantablack.
Then came the feud. In 2016 the sculptor Anish Kapoor got exclusive rights to use Vantablack in art. Many artists objected. The artist Stuart Semple answered with 'The World's Pinkest Pink', sold to anyone who declared they weren't Kapoor; Kapoor got some anyway and posted a photo of his middle finger dipped in it. Semple went on to make cheap matte blacks for everyone (see owning a color).
Ordinary black paint reflects a few percent of light, which is why black cars and shoes still show highlights and shape. Painters often avoid pure black altogether and mix dark complements instead, as the Impressionists did.
Swatches
- Vantablack · ~0.035% reflected (screen can't show it)
- Ordinary black paint · a few % reflected
Colors
Sources
- Surrey NanoSystems. Vantablack technical information.
- Cui, K. & Wardle, B. L. (2019). Breakdown of native oxide enables multifunctional, free-form carbon nanotube–metal hierarchical architectures. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 11(38).
- Wikipedia, 'Vantablack' and 'Stuart Semple'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.