The library of rare colors 

I realised, after filming this, that it feels a little weird to have my introduction outside the Museum and the interview inside. But I'm weeks out of Boston now, so it has to stand!

Going straight from VantaBlack to showing Stuart Semple's Pinkest Pink and Diamond Dust was a move of pure classiness.

This feels like something someone would start as a hobby, and somehow turned it into a job.

Imagine dying, being mummified, and then thousands of years later, getting mushed up and put on a canvas. There’s donating your body to science, and then there’s whatever this is...

"When I was 18, i sloppily said: I rather collect colors then go to work" ... "50 years later, here I am, at this University. I am the Master of Colors and Pigmentresearch."

I study chemistry and one of the best things is when your product turns a colour you have never seen. I had a liquid that was red from the top and green from the side, turns out it was the Tyndall effect.

I had a dream about a brand new colour I discovered! However, it turned out to be just a pigment of my imagination...

3:17 "Lead white is toxic in the way that lead is...toxic." Best quote in the video.

My favorite part of this video is seeing Stuart Semple's color creations featured immediately after the Anish Kapoor owned "Vanta-Black." If you're not aware of the awesomely petty but insanely entertaining feud between the two, please look it up.

Someone else was commenting on vantablack that it was especially odd when it was on crinkled aluminum foil; it absorbs light so well that the foil looks flat because how it looks doesn't depend on the angle of the surface. It looks like a hole in reality or a rendering error rather than a paint color.

Having a shot of Stuart Semple's "exclusive" dyes seconds after the bit on Vantablack was a class act that you may well never top, Tom. Well done.

Awesome video.

Stuart Semple's pink is really the pinkest pink I've ever seen (4:36), and is worth buying just to make pink things at home

I have a weird obsession with color and pigment, and this video was heaven for me

I am fascinated by the extinction of Quinacridone Gold. It was discontinued as an artist grade pigment in 2018, as the automotive industry simply stopped using it, and it was no longer available to artists. Artists are a small percentage of the consumers of pigment and we simply get what other industries need.

Tom, while you are at Harvard you might enjoy visiting the *Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants* (aka *Glass Flowers*). It’s one of those “has to be seen to be believed” things, pictures don’t do it justice. Amazing in detail, artistry, and scope, it’s both a teaching tool and a stunning artistic achievement.

As a graphic designer for 23 years, the colors in this video took my breath away- I stopped it and took about 100 screen shots! I’m so very happy there are people who have preserved this part of history, and those who continue to develop new material for us all to share. What a neat video, Thank you.

"We have 60 different samples of Hematite" How awesome would it be if they eventually got a Hematite sample from Mars to add to the collection after some astronaut decides "Hey, I'm going to paint something out of paint I make myself"

Glad to see Stuart's Pinkest Pink in there.

As an artist, it's amazing to look at the differences in consistently and how paint changes over time. It's fascinating that we now have things like the Pantone charts and grading to get exact shades and variations. Furthermore, there are modern digital tools that try and copy traditional looks and textures of classical mediums. However, I don't think we've gotten to the point where we can simulate the exact outcomes. We can only get close to it.

when you're not sure if you want to major in chemistry or art so you just do both

Tom you never cease to amaze in finding bizarre yet fascinating places

This is amazing, I could spend countless days glancing around there at all the colors, knowing they all have their own story behind them. Its fascinating, we should cherish things like this and the people that do those jobs.

I love this video so much, pausing, going back, and reacting out loud the entire time. I think I’ve already rewatched it dozens of times and just started it a little bit ago. So interesting! I can’t wait to check out the book that kept getting mentioned. This was really cool! Imagine not having paint readily available and having to get so creative and figure it out before you could even create the work! 🤩🌈🎨

I recommend reading 'Secret Lives of Colour' by Kassia St Clair if anyone wants to read about origins and uses of some of the most popular and influential colours.

I used to custom match paint colors manually (as opposed to using a color sensor and having a computer make the formula) for a couple paint stores and i fell in love with it! this collection is absolute heaven!! wow, i can only imagine the colors my monitor cant show accurately....

Him: “Mummy brown is made up from crushed Egyptian mummies.” Me: Hmmm interesting Also him: “Indian yellow...” Me: absolutely disgusting..

Haha, just had to get that shot of pinkest pink just after vantablack.

Putting vantablack under a reflective glass plate kinda defeats it's purpose, doesn't it?

The Harvard Art Museums are incredible. Definitely worth a trip up to Boston/Cambridge just to visit. They often get overshadowed by NYC’s museums, but are wholly unique (this pigment collection being just one of the many specialties).

Props to the editor who put the B-roll of Pinkest Pink and Diamond Dust in right after talking about Vantablack. Brilliant!

it was a great pleasure to get closer than the average museum goer to this collection and see real deal what i'm working with as a painter. glad you got that opportunity as well, and put it up on youtube for the world to see.

As an artist i found this both fascinating and delightful 😀 thanks for spotlighting this! 👍

Burnt Umber - one of my favourite colours when a kid in school - I now live a few miles from one place they used to make it and worked in the building for a short while - long after the furnace had been removed though. Fascinating stuff!

I love this video, this is a perfect example of the things that matter out in the world in their own way that you shine light on Tom. Loving it.

This is wonderful. If you want to learn more about the histories of pigments, I recommend The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St. Clair.

This is one of those exhibits I never would've sauntered into on my own accord, but Tom manages to put it in an interesting light. 5 stars, Tom 👍

I actually got excited when I found out they actually have mummy brown. That's such a weird thing, the whole mummy fascination of the Victorians.

Tom, if you haven't, you should do an episode on how/why magenta isn't a 'real' color... Its a fascinating perspective on color theory;

1:38 I love the way the building and sorting is arranged.

thanks to Tom Scott for my win in a pub quiz last week, one of the questions was on mummy-based pigments, another about the 1904 olympic marathon (from citation needed). Couldn't have done it without him

As an artist and a scientist, I would love to have a job like this 😍

colour exist artist: *gotta catch them all*

I highly recommend “The Secret Lives of Color” by Kassia St. Clair. It talks all about the history and invention of pigments like these. It’s really fascinating.

I'm so obsessed with pigments and how they work. It's so wild

Surprised that ultramarine wasn't mentioned in any of the blues. It's made from ground up lapis lazuli and processed to pull out only the blue lazurite. My favorite color😁

Incredible. They should do some kind of public exhibition to show what they are doing. It would be so interesting.

This museum is so cool. Really want a documentary series to explain all the colors and their origins

Another great and interesting video. Never wondered how they judged forgery from authentic in the art world :)

I'd gladly spend hours there, just to look at the coours and learn about the ancient pigments. It's so fascinating. Pity is not open to the public.

Something about this whole collection is really inspiring

I love that someone put star stickers on the jars, that's just so sweet :)

Even with the limitations of cameras and digital screens, there were some really nice colours shown off here

OMG! That was freaking awesome! Thank you for sharing this with us ❣️

Nice to see some Kremer Pigmente 3:47 on their shelves, too. Amazing company making pigments in Bavaria, Germany.

This was absolutely fascinating! This place is now on my must-see list.

The Pigment collection is awesome! Really interesting details shared by the curator there. I want to hear more :)

I would definitely attend a display of these colours and the materials used to make them, it's so fascinating!

That is utterly fantastic. I absolutely love this.

I would love to see these colours in real life.

mummie brown = ground up mummie baby oil = ground up b..... wait what

So cool! I spend a lot of time dealing with color, but it’s almost all on the computer (or printing by extension), so it’s fun to be reminded of the many ways color gets created outside of the digital realm!!!

As someone who has been specializing in making their own paint (mostly historic, but a few modern paints too), this collection is mindblowing. (And yes, even with my desire to work as historically accurately as possible, even I won't work with lead white and other incredibly toxic substances.)

As someone who enjoys chemistry and history in general and reliably winds up in hours long wiki dives every time I look up a paint pigment or dye, I'm really disappointed to hear this isn't available to the public. I'd love to visit a museum where I actually got to see the pigments on display like that, with a writeup about their historical use and interesting chemical properties. (Pigments can get very interesting on the chemical side - Han purple is an excellent example of this - it's a 2500 year old pigment that has some properties that are related to engineering goals for high temperature superconductors and quantum computing. I'd be more specific if I could, but even if I could find a more technical description of those properties, I wouldn't have a clue what it meant.)

I'd love a series just on colour.

Thank you for coming to our city! I hope you enjoyed exploring the Harvard Art Museum and the other museums in the area, artistic and scientific.

As a partial colorblind I'm actually quite curious to how they all actually look on our eyes...

I love this video. Though I also love seeing that several of the colors aren't necessarily rare, but probably produced from different batches. Rather surprised more of the Cadmiums and Cobalts didn't have the toxic mark on them.

I love all the interesting topics and places you she's with us, Tom. It's fun but also educational without talking to us like we are children. You have a great channel. Love from the Netherlands.

Thanks for this awesome video! I am a painter and I live in Boston. I’ve been to this exhibit before, but only a small amount of pigments are out of display, the vast majority are too far away to be really observed, so this video was a treat! Thank you.

As a sewist, I'm interested in color of fabric. This was fascinating.

This is so cool! I wonder if something similar exists for pigments used in dying textiles.

I work at an art supply store with some high end specialty paints, and one of my favorite things to do to demonstrate the difference between lead oils and non lead oils is have customers hold a tube of a modern paint, and then hand them a tube of red lead

The colours are an absolute feast for the eyes 😍

This is great. I love obsessing about pigments. Ultramarine Blue (PB29) can be made in a lab way better than it could back in the day, and is purer, stronger, and cheaper. I wish you spent a bit of time looking at the Pthtalos and Quins though. Especially quin gold, which is now discontinued. :-)

Tom thank you for your videos. In the depressing times we have to deal with it is nice to see a video on how fascinating our world is.

I'm sure a lot of us out there appreciate the video, as we grow more in to the digital age we need to work on cameras that can define these awesome pigments to their true precise color.

Cool! You always show me things I hadn’t even thought of as something people need.

My favourite field: the chemistry of colour! Specially form a historical point of view!

This whole video seems like a short film, from cast to story, kinda amazing what different kind sof places exist in the world

Absolutely remarkable!

In the video the curator mentions how chemical pigments & light affect the colours over time. It makes me wonder how they know what the original colour actually was.

As a photographer that went thru college the part from .58 seconds to 1.45 makes me appreciate color beside my color theory class. Making a picture color balanced makes photographers consider what is white or middle grey with no color cast. But before color photography one would have to use paint/dye to convey proper color. Even photo realistic paintings may look right but the color when matched to real world color may be wrong. I never thought of a painter taking paint and putting it next to a subject or trying to match a color with different materials. I took art class and mixing colors makes sense and trying to match a color but it's amazing to think of trying to match real world color with a specific rock or leaf etc. . Knowing they have a library of materials used to make colors and synthetic copies is awesome. I would love a program that would take colors from a photo and show the Materials/ColorName/OrignalPaint/ReProPaint to match parts of a photo.

For years now, you've developed this ability to curate our access to every corner of humanity. Keep it up, and thank you!

Chemistry lab storage + Art gallery. Interesting.

Very similar to the Hafkenscheid cabinet that also contains hundreds of authentic pigments. It's at the teylers museum in the Netherlands.

Very interesting. As photography and printing are in my wheelhouse i work in rgb, cmyk etc. I know about colours and pigments but i never realised they'd A) keep a "backup" of them and B) that backup would be a colour matched version and a chermical twin which isn't necessarily the same colour! Will have to dig deeper now!

Very interesting. Thanks! It takes me back several years ago to when I decided to make a simple U.S. flag image to add to my computer desktop background rotation. The dimensions were easy to replicate but just using the standard red, blue and white made it look like crap. I did a quick online search and found the RBG values for "Old Glory Red" and "Old Glory Blue." It looked so much better with those values. Who would have thought? Well, Tom Scott probably would have...

I love learning where colored pigment comes from. Thanks so much!

I wonder if there's a scientific way to describe/define a certain color. A way that doesn't uses references to certain materials that are dissolving over time, but actualy physical constants. So even if the original color/pigment is dissolved over time, you can reproduce the color exactly the same, even though the materials used are not the same.

Thanks Tom. Always been fascinated y colors, pigments and other ways to represent colors

Absolutely fascinating! Thank-you for sharing.

My favorite color I've encountered in lab settings is fluorescein diluted in water solution. Depending on pH it can be orange, or bright green. And when I say bright green, I mean that green colour that we think of when we think "radioactive". It looks so vibrant, and almost like it glows from the inside.

I'm not particularly interested in paintings or visual art, but the chemistry behind it is fascinating.

the fact that they use them for reference and not for mere preservation is one of the most interesting parts for me

I somehow forget these pigments have to be made by things, they don't just happen. How amazing.

3:39 - 3:50 it’s fascinating that with all our advancements of video technology, we still can’t 100% replicate the in-person experience in a video format. Rock concerts-or any concert for that matter-are an excellent example of this. You see people whip out their phones to film a band that is playing, but it fails to emulate the experience of physically seeing a guitarist strum their instruments and hearing it at the same time and with the exact sound it has. hearing the audio and the analogue mesh perfectly is just something we can’t capture perfectly at this point in time. Idk, it’s just interesting.

This is incredible. I had no idea I would be so interested in this

I could spend hours listening and learning where did each color came from. That's so cool!

I got to take a class in Solid State chemistry from Mas Subramamian. There was definitely a lecture about YInMn Blue at one point. Inorganic pigments and their structure/function is preeeety friggen sweet.