Botanic Photonics

Interdisciplinary Research group in the Physics Department at the University of Bath, UK

Self-assembled, disordered structural color from fruit wax bloom

We found that the colour of common fruits like blueberries, juniper ‘berries’, damsons, mahonia fruits … is caused by light scattering from the nanostructure of the wax on the outside of the skin. Perhaps even more excitingly, we were able to reproduce the waxy coloration by self-assembling wax that we had collected from the fruits to make the same nanostructure.

Read the paper here