Goths and metalheads unite: aerospace engineers just invented the blackest black ever. British company Surrey NanoSystems created a material called Vantablack, which absorbs 99.96% of light. Basically, this means you can apply the material to any surface, and it will transform it into (what looks like) a black hole. Whoaaaaa.
Spinal Tap
Quick science lesson: this stuff is made up of carbon nanotubes which, according to the company’s chief technical officer Ben Jensen, can “grow very quickly.” He told The Guardian, “Take one of the hairs on your head. Split that hair 10,000 times and one of the strands that you take away is the size of the tubes that we grow.” Even though this material was created for astronomical cameras and telescopes, we can barely imagine the possibilities of Vantablack being applied to clothing.
Surrey NanoSystems
To visualize, Vantablack has been coated on a crumpled sheet of foil (above), but to the human eye, it looks totally flat. When Ben was asked about the potential of creating an LBD (or would it be LVD?), he said it would be “very expensive” and that “you would lose all features of the dress. It would just be something black passing through.” Is it bad that we’re oddly excited about that part? Sayonara, Spanx!
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