In a weirdly serious scrap of hair research , engineers have figure out how to convert hair color without an ounce of pilus dye . The only match ? You involve a focused ion beam .
Color is in the middle of the beholder after all . When microscope spirals and hyperbola are engrave into filament of hair with a focused ion beam , those midget ridgeline work together to diffract light . sure wavelength are canceled out , others amplified and you get a whole new coloring material . No haircloth dye needed .
Nano traffic pattern etch into hair . University of New Mexico .
The procedure is detailed in apaperin the Journal of Cosmetics , Dermatological Sciences and Applications , where engineers at Los Alamos National Labs and the University of New Mexico test strands of calamitous , brown , and light-haired tomentum . Unlike with hair dye , this subprogram in reality worked the best in brown hair .
The photo at the top of this mail , which accompaniedUniversity of New Mexico ’s pressure releaseabout this study , is not , we should say , realism so much as imagined reality . The engineered have not in reality produce a whisker iron that can shift your hair color ; they ’ve done it to individual strand of hair in the laboratory with a million dollar motorcar .
Nevertheless , this frivolous - seeming pilus exercise leads us to the interesting idea of “ structural color . ” Structural color was not invent by these fuzz - etching scientists — it ’s present all throughout nature .
You may have get wind the assertion that “ there is no blue in nature . ” It ’s obviously not completely straight — appear around — but blue in nature is often morphologic . Take a peacock ’s wing , for feather , where microscopical ridge scatter light up to appear blue to our eyes . Or marble berries , supposedly the most vivid blue in nature , which has layer of cells that amplify dingy withconstructive hitch .
Marble berry . Juliano Casto / Wikimedia Commons
apart looking being pretty , structural colors have some advantages over traditional dyes or paints . For one , they are n’t dyestuff or rouge , so they miss the potential cruddy chemicals we might bump in them . Structural vividness also do n’t evanesce over time in the sun . There could be all type of uses for the non - toxic structural colors that scientist areworking to develop — much more than tomentum colouring . [ University of New Mexico ]
Images viaUniversity of Mexico
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