BLUE: The Science and Secrets of Nature's Rarest Color, gorgeous book about most people's favorite color

BLUE: The Science and Secrets of Nature's Rarest Color
KAI KUPFERSCHMIDT
The Experiment
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A globe-trotting quest to find blue in the natural world—and to understand our collective obsession with this bewitching color

Blue is a rare color—natural blue, that is. From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue—and most that appear so are doing sleight of hand with physics or complex chemistry. Flowers modify the red pigment anthocyanin to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light.

Yet this hard-to-spot accent color in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. His quest to find and understand his favorite color and its hallowed place in our culture takes him to a gene-splicing laboratory in Japan, a volcanic lake in Oregon, and to Brandenburg, Germany—home of the last Spix’s macaws. From deep underground where blue minerals grow into crystals to miles away in space where satellites gaze down at our “blue marble” planet, wherever we do find blue, it always has a story to tell.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Where do you fall on this infographic?

A solid plurality of the world's people are fondest of the color blue. (Red's my choice.) The amazing thing is, this is a really rare color whether as a pigment...a substance that stays blue even when altered...or as a structural color, when the way a surface reflects and/or refracts light causes the eye to perceive it as blue.

Blue light is rare on the surface of the Earth. Green is, as I imagine you can suss out, the most common color of light down here. That's how plants can afford to reflect it, so we see their leaves as green.

Cornflower blue is a very satisfying color, but I still prefer the stem myownself. The Table of Contents gives you a good, solid feel for this book's modus operandi. You're going to see beautiful images throughout, of course, but they're llustrating concepts about color, how it is made, seen, and used in the natural world.

Rocks are the primary sources of blue pigments. They are not always stable in their blueness, with many things impacting that stability. The kind of light and the amount and humidity of air the pigments are exposed to can impact the stability of the color perceived by our eyes.

Animals apearing blue to our eyes are using structural color, the kind that relies on properties of the surface of the animal to show as blue. Changing a factor in the environment, or simply moving one's angle of view, will cause the color to change or disappear.

The surface now being scratched, I hope you can appreciate the subtle way a color comes to exist in your mind is the actual subject of this book. Kai Kupferschmidt is a science journalist based in Berlin, with degrees in molecular biomedicine, so he's a reliable guide to the science he's discussing. What he isn't is a boring writer. He's equally facile at disccussing Picasso's Blue Period and how our eyes do the work of showing us color.

This book gets my vote for going into the stocking of young artists, biologists, physicists...reall, anyone who loves blue, likes learning, and can appreciate a beautiful browsing book that also repays solid reading time.