Blackest black
Emmanuelle Alt, the editor in chief of Vogue Paris, is said to have quipped: “I’ll stop wearing black when they invent a darker color.” The Frenchwoman may want to schedule a Harvard visit. British biotech company Surrey NanoSystems has developed what it calls “the darkest man-made substance,” a material known as Vantablack, a sample of which is now part of the collections at the Harvard Art Museums. The color is located in the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies’ Forbes Pigments Collection, an assortment of about 2,500 synthetic and organic pigments that helps conservators, curators, and students study and safeguard artworks. Just how black can black get? Vantablack absorbs close to 100 percent of light. The material is less a traditional pigment — a powdery substance typically combined with a binding medium and spread on canvas — than the product of a complicated scientific process involving carbon nanotubes cultivated on...