A talk by Professor Andrew Parker, Founder of Lifescaped Ltd.

Our tradition understanding of colour is based on how light reflects on a surface with pigmentation. However nature does things differently. What you see on an intense-coloured butterfly wing isn’t a pigment: its a structural colour which occurs when completely transparent patterned structure on the wings are able to separate channel and reflect specific wavelengths of light. The effect is produced by different mechanisms with distances of hundreds of nanometers between boundaries or crystal blocks determining the exact hues reflected back.