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

YInMn blue

The first genuinely new inorganic blue in two centuries, found in 2009 by a graduate student who pulled the wrong thing out of a furnace.

Also called Oregon blue · Blue 513

Hex: #2E5090
RGB: 46, 80, 144
Pigment index: PB86
First used: 2009, on sale from 2016
From: Oregon State University, Corvallis

What it is

Yttrium indium manganese oxide, YIn₁₋ₓMnₓO₃. The name is the three metals.

How it is made

Oxides of yttrium, indium and manganese are fired at about 1200°C. Mas Subramanian's group at Oregon State were looking for materials with useful electronic properties, not for a pigment; a sample came out of the furnace an intense blue, and the graduate student Andrew Smith had the sense to notice rather than to record a failed result.

The colour comes from manganese sitting in an unusual trigonal bipyramidal site in the crystal, which absorbs red and green strongly and reflects blue. It is a structural colour in the crystallographic sense rather than a molecular one, which is why it is so stable.

Indium is the problem. It is expensive and not abundant, which is why this pigment costs orders of magnitude more than cobalt blue and why the research since has been about replacing it.

YInMn blue: Photograph of YInMn Blue (YIn1−xMnxO3) as synthesized in the laboratory. — Photograph of YInMn Blue (YIn1−xMnxO3) as synthesized in the laboratory.Mas Subramanian/Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

YInMn blue, Synthetic inorganic blue pigment. Wikipedia's description, not ours.

The history

Blue pigments have a bad record for durability and toxicity. Cobalt is toxic and expensive, Prussian blue fades against alkali, ultramarine is acid-sensitive, phthalo is organic and behaves like a dye. YInMn is none of those: chemically inert, non-toxic, completely lightfast, and it reflects infrared strongly, which means a roof painted with it stays measurably cooler than one painted with any other blue of the same darkness. That last property is the commercially serious one.

It was approved for commercial use in the United States in 2017 and for artists' paint from 2019-20, at a price that makes a small tube cost more than a good dinner. Crayola released a crayon inspired by it, which is a strange fate for a piece of solid-state chemistry.

There is a fair objection to how it is talked about. It is not a colour nobody has ever seen. It sits close to cobalt blue and a person could not pick it out of a line-up. What is new is the material, and the properties that come with it. 'The first new blue in 200 years' is a true statement about chemistry being sold as a statement about perception.

Where it is used

Cool roofs and heat-reflective coatings, industrial plastics, and a very expensive tube of artists' paint. The infrared reflectance is where the volume will be.

For anyone specifying brand colour there is a real idea buried here: a colour can have properties beyond its appearance. This one keeps a building cooler. A fluorescent keeps a worker visible. A retroreflective sign works at night and dies in daylight photography. Choosing a colour purely by how it looks on a screen throws away every one of those considerations.

Go and look at it

Subramanian's lab samples
Oregon State University, Corvallis
The original furnace batch. The discovery has a date, a room and a graduate student's name attached, which is rare for a colour.

How it behaves

Made of: Yttrium indium manganese oxide, YIn₁₋ₓMnₓO₃. The name is the three metals.
Opacity: Opaque. It covers what is under it.
Lightfastness: Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.

Reflects near-infrared strongly, surfaces painted with it run cooler.
Non-toxic and chemically inert, unlike most historic blues.
Very expensive, because of the indium.

The numbers

All derived from the hex, never typed beside it

HEX: #2E5090; What a browser and a design file want.
RGB: 46, 80, 144; The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
HSL: 219°, 52%, 37%; Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
CMYK: 68, 44, 0, 44; Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
LAB: 35, 10, -39; Perceptual. L* of 35 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.

This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. YInMn blue is a substance. A ground mineral scatters light from thousands of separate grains at slightly different angles, and no single sRGB value is that event. It is a flat average of a photograph of it, and the real thing is outside what a screen can emit. Use the number to specify a screen colour. Do not use it to judge the pigment.

Where it sits on the wheel

Hue 219°

Its opposite, by the diagram

#2E5090

#906E2E

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

#2E5090

#4D6AA1

#6D85B1

#97A8C8

#C0CBDE

#E0E5EE

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

#2E5090

#27447A

#203865

#172848

#0E182B

#070C16

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
7.88:1 · AAA

Handgloves

Black on it
2.67:1 · Fails

Handgloves

It on paper
7.48:1 · AAA

Handgloves

It on ink
2.32:1 · 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.