The Search for the Next Billion Dollar Color

Mas Subramanian is one of the most recognizable names in pigment research. A professor of materials science at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, Subramanian has spent his nine years in this strange and discriminating field of color obsessed with a form of chemistry that he, like many of his peers, once thought was very low - tech. His fame stems from his accidental creation in 2009 of a new pigment, a substance capable of imparting color to another material. yInMn blue (pronounced YIN-min) is an amalgam of yttrium, indium oxide and manganese, elements deep in the periodic table that together make up something unique. yInMn is the first blue pigment discovered in more than 200 years.

It was not only the exotic blues that inspired the color industry, but the other shades that pigments could produce. subramanian soon realized that by adding copper, he could make greens. With iron, he gets orange. Zinc and titanium, a soft purple.

Scanning the pieces scattered across his workbench, like evidence of a Willy Wonka bender, he frowns. "We've made other colors," he says. "But we haven't found red."

The world lacks a great all-purpose red. There always has been. We've used alternatives that could be toxic or obviously nasty. Gladiators painted their faces with a mercury-based vermilion. Titian painted with an arsenic-based mineral called andrographis. The British army's red coats were infused with crushed cochineal beetles. For decades, red Lego blocks have contained the carcinogen cadmium.

Over 200 natural and synthetic red pigments exist, but each has problems with safety, stability, chroma and/or opacity. For example, Red 254, also known as Ferrari Red, is safe and popular, but it is also carbon-based and therefore prone to fading in the rain or at high temperatures. One red color is stable, non-toxic and timeless: iron oxide or red ochre, the reddish clay found in Paleolithic cave wall paintings. It is not as bright as one would like.

A new pigment can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year, affecting product categories from plastics to cosmetics to automobiles to architecture. The most commercially successful blue phthalocyanines exist in eye shadow, hairspray, and even cars on British railroads. subramanian's blue seemed superior, but that didn't mean it made him rich. The initial scientific pursuit opened up a whole new set of challenges to get YInMn approved, manufactured and on the market.

As that process proceeds, Subramanian, who is more scientist than CEO, is now looking for an equally safe inorganic red derivative of YInMn - one that could give Ferrari red - worth an estimated $300 million a year - a place in its rearview mirror.

Subramanian, 64, is short, small-bellied, with a black beard that curls up the sides of his mouth. He grew up in Chennai on India's southeast coast and became interested in the composition of objects by examining the beautiful shells that washed ashore. "How does nature make these things?" he would ask himself. It wasn't until much later that he began to ask how these shells turned into color.

Technically speaking, color is the visual perception of light as it is bent, scattered or reflected in the atomic composition of an object. Modern computers can display about 16.8 million of them, far more than one can see or a printer can reproduce. To translate digital or imaginary colors into something tangible, you need paint. Yes, you have this wonderful blue color, which is more than just color. It's the chemistry of the color. Can this composition really be achieved in the material I'm going to apply?

What comes out of the oven is a blue so dazzling, so wonderful, it looks almost alien

This limitation limits the pool of pigments available to the apparel, architectural, technology and other industries. A single titanium dioxide accounts for nearly two-thirds of the pigments produced worldwide; worth about $13.2 billion, it is responsible for making traffic lanes, toothpaste and doughnut powder white. Historically, obtaining other colors meant adding dangerous inorganic elements or compounds such as lead, cobalt, and even cyanide. In recent years, health and environmental regulations have given a strong push to the development of more benign organic pigments, leading researchers to discover a plethora of blacks, yellows and greens. Blue is a different story.

Subramanian entered the chronicles of pigment knowledge, even though he wasn't looking for pigments or even mixing ingredients thought to produce unique colors. He and his co-researchers were working on electronics - specifically a multiferroic material, one with both electrical and magnetic polarization, that could be used in computing. Yttrium starts out pale white, indium oxide is black and manganese is bile yellow. Andrew Smith, a postdoctoral student at Subramanian, grinds them to a gray color, puts the mixture into a small dish and puts it into a furnace heated to 2,200F. Twelve hours later, it emerged from the oven a deep, vibrant, intoxicating blue. It is so radiant, so wonderful, it almost looks like an alien - the ripest Venus blueberry, cleaned, polished and glowing from within.