The Palette/black/Made in a lab or a works

Vantablack

Not a pigment at all: a forest of carbon nanotubes that light falls into and does not come back out of, absorbing about 99.96% of what hits it.

Also called VANTA, vertically aligned nanotube array

Hex: #000000
RGB: 0, 0, 0
First used: 2014
From: Surrey NanoSystems, England

What it is

Vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays, grown on a substrate. There is nothing to grind and nothing to paint with.

How it is made

Carbon nanotubes are grown vertically on a surface by chemical vapour deposition, at temperatures that limit what you can grow it on. Light entering the array between the tubes bounces around among them and is absorbed rather than reflected, which is why it is so dark: the blackness is a structure, not a substance.

The consequence is that it cannot be applied like paint, is fragile, and only works on a prepared substrate. The spray-applied versions that followed (VBx) are considerably less black and behave more like a coating, which is the version that has actually been used on objects.

Its real market is optical: baffles and shrouds in telescopes, sensors and satellites, where stray light is the enemy. That was the point of developing it.

Vantablack, Synthetic material, one of the darkest substances known. Wikipedia's description, not ours.

The history

In 2016 Anish Kapoor's studio acquired exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack, which caused one of the better public arguments in recent art. The artist Stuart Semple responded by making and selling pigments (including a 'blackest black' paint and a fluorescent pink) to everybody in the world except Anish Kapoor, with an order form that required you to affirm you were not him.

The argument is more interesting than the joke. Kapoor's position was that exclusivity is a legitimate part of an artist's material practice, which has a long precedent: Klein's IKB, Rembrandt's grounds, any studio's private recipe. Semple's position was that pigment is the commons of art and enclosing it is a different act from developing it. Both are arguable and the case cannot be settled by pointing at the law, because no law was in question: this was a commercial licence, freely given by a company that owned a technology.

Meanwhile MIT reported a nanotube material in 2019 that absorbs more than Vantablack, and it was first shown on a diamond. The record is not the point. The point is that 'the blackest black' turned out to be an engineering spec that a lab can beat on a Tuesday, and building a claim on being the most extreme version of something is a poor foundation.

Where it is used

Telescope and satellite optics, sensor calibration, and stray-light suppression. Then art, and then a considerable amount of press.

Its relevance to anyone working with colour is what it reveals about black on a screen. An OLED at #000000 is genuinely emitting nothing and is the closest most people get to this experience, and it is why dark interfaces on OLED look different from dark interfaces on LCD. The colour is the same value and the physical event is not, and no hex code carries that difference.

Go and look at it

Kapoor's Vantablack works
Exhibited occasionally; the 2022 Venice showing at Palazzo Manfrin
In person the surface reads as a void rather than a colour. Photographs cannot carry it, which is the whole problem with reproducing it.
Stuart Semple's Black 3.0 and Pink
Available to anybody who is not Anish Kapoor
A protest conducted entirely through a product. Read the order form.

How it behaves

Made of: Vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays, grown on a substrate. There is nothing to grind and nothing to paint with.
Opacity: Opaque. It covers what is under it.
Lightfastness: Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.

Structural rather than chemical. The darkness comes from geometry.
Extremely fragile. It can be damaged by touch and cannot be handled like paint.
Absorbs across the visible and into the infrared, which is what the optics industry buys it for.

The numbers

All derived from the hex, never typed beside it

HEX: #000000; What a browser and a design file want.
RGB: 0, 0, 0; The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
HSL: 0°, 0%, 0%; Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
CMYK: 0, 0, 0, 100; Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
LAB: 0, 0, 0; Perceptual. L* of 0 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.

Where it sits on the wheel

Hue 0°

Its opposite, by the diagram

#000000

The arithmetic opposite, 180° round in HSL. Useful, and not the same as the opposite a painter mixing pigment would name, that wheel was built for paint.

Lighter and darker

Towards white

#000000

#262626

#4D4D4D

#808080

#B3B3B3

#D9D9D9

Mixing with white does not only lighten, it dulls and cools. This is why a pale tint of a brand colour so often looks chalky, and why a designed light shade beats a generated one.

Towards black

#000000

Mixing with black kills the hue as it darkens. A better dark is usually the colour plus its neighbour round the wheel, which is what every painter does instead.

Can you set type on it

Handgloves

White on it
21.00:1 · AAA

Handgloves

Black on it
1.00:1 · Fails

Handgloves

It on paper
19.93:1 · AAA

Handgloves

It on ink
1.15:1 · Fails

4.5:1 is the floor for body text and 3:1 for large text, by WCAG. Treat it as a minimum you may not go under rather than as a target: plenty of pairs pass at 4.6:1 and are still unpleasant to read for a page, and the checker will not tell you that.