I was just about to edit in that suggestion, when I saw that you had posted it!
Your other ideas seem spot on, as well.
I was just about to edit in that suggestion, when I saw that you had posted it!
I think if you’re going to write any kind of boustrophedon and post it, you’ll have to take a picture and post the picture.
Monkeys don't have blue pigments, no. You can tell because the blue is so bright! This is, again, structural colour - their skin is actually a dark grey/black. What they do is line up layers of proteins in completely parallel fibres a particular distance apart; this creates interference patterns in light that's reflected off the pattern, and only the blue survives, with everything else cancelling itself out. It's analogous to (although a different precise mechanism from) the way that black oil can look green or purple - the monkeys have not only evolved interference patterns, but found a way to stabilise them to show only one colour from all angles.Pabappa wrote: ↑20 Mar 2019 15:54 there are blue pigments in monkeys like this one, but theyre in the skin, not the hair. Im not sure its biologically plausible for whatever pigment that is to transfer from the skin to the hair, but hair is made of keratin, which is also an outer skin component, so maybe?
You can get Bragg reflection due to structural color off of single fibers, though: the trick is what the internal structure of the specific fiber looks like. (I mention this because, in the lab, I'm actually working with Bragg reflecting fibers.)Salmoneus wrote: ↑21 Mar 2019 00:03 Monkeys don't have blue pigments, no. You can tell because the blue is so bright! This is, again, structural colour - their skin is actually a dark grey/black. What they do is line up layers of proteins in completely parallel fibres a particular distance apart; this creates interference patterns in light that's reflected off the pattern, and only the blue survives, with everything else cancelling itself out. It's analogous to (although a different precise mechanism from) the way that black oil can look green or purple - the monkeys have not only evolved interference patterns, but found a way to stabilise them to show only one colour from all angles.
Again, however, you couldn't get that effect with hair, because hair fibres can't be made to all line up - because hair is non-rigid. [I guess you could create some sort of effect with very short, very dense hair, not long enough or with enough space to fall out of line?]