omfg i forgot that i never showed tumblr my greatest achievement. my pride and joy, my pi-ass de résistance
you’re welcome
if you reblog this i am kissing you on the mouth. no that is not negotiable. we are in love now. we are dating. we are planning the wedding. i will be with you on your wedding night
I was going to just leave this in the tags but no, I’ve seen too many people misunderstand this and it’s very simple and easy to explain so I don’t know why anyone who shares this fun fact doesn’t use this analogy.
so if you took a few leaves and threw them into a blender and pulverize them to as fine a paste that you could they would still be green. this is because chlorophyll has a green PIGMENT in it. now I can’t speak to the base color of blue jay feathers so we’re just going to talk about blue macaws for this example. If you went and put a Blue macaw feather in a blender and pulverized it to the finest powder that you could you would get black powder. this is because blue macaw feathers have black pigment in them, but they reflect blue light because of a microscopic bubble texture on the surface.
to explain it further, have you ever seen one of those little rainbow hologram things? like how they’ll put a holographic Crystal or sparkle pattern on like a Pokemon card?
yeah that motherfucker, if you tried to scrape the top layer of this card off to get the hologram “pigment”, you wouldn’t get bubkis. in fact if you scrape the top of this card very lightly, the yellow part would still stay yellow because it’s yellow because it is PIGMENTED, but the hologram where you scratch it will stop being holographic. now it will still have the pigment underneath it because that is pigmented but the rainbow effect comes from a TEXTURE on the top.
you could even put these kind of holograms on chocolate, are you following? it’s a texture!
it’s the same reason that bubbles are rainbow colored despite being too thin to see pigment in them.
IT’S A TEXTUREEEEEEE!!!
blue pigment will always be blue, you can crush up a Rose and use the Rose goop to color something else the color of that Rose! leaves, bones, clay, rocks!! that’s pigment! disturbing its structure will not change the color because its a PIGMENT!!!
but a blue macaw? a pigeon’s neck? a raven’s feathers? and a blue jay apparently? that’s a texture.
“yeah that’s how color works” NO!! bubbles are clear!!! they just happen to have a broad spectrum iridescent TEXTURE, and some bird feathers have a short spectrum of iridescence.
“there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so gorgeous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.”
— Ross Gay, excerpt of “Sorrow Is Not My Name”, in Bringing the Shovel Down (via antigonick)
