Opinion Is Olo a ‘real' colour? That's the wrong question

Indian Express

27-04-2025

In 2014, the world encountered a colour that seemed to bend reality. It wasn't bright, it wasn't bold — in fact, it wasn't even really seen. Vantablack — short for Vertically Aligned NanoTube Array black — wasn't just the darkest colour humans had ever created. It was an absence made visible. Absorbing 99.96 per cent of visible light rendered any surface coated into a void. No shadows, no texture, no form — just pure, unnerving black.
Originally engineered by Surrey NanoSystems for scientific use — telescopes, stealth tech, and heat-sensitive instruments — Vantablack was never meant for the art world. But word spread. Designers, artists, and technologists became obsessed with its potential. It was a black that erased shape, a colour that turned three dimensions into flatness. To witness it was to question what your eyes were telling you.
Then came the twist in the tale: Anish Kapoor, the British Indian artist, blocked the colour for himself. He acquired the exclusive usage rights for Vantablank in artworks. And just like that, the blackest black wasn't just a pigment — it was a controversy. Could one artist own a colour? Should they? Kapoor, already known for creating giant reflective voids and sensorial paradoxes, saw it as a tool to continue his life's work — exploring the unseen, the formless, and the spiritual. But his monopoly sparked outrage among other creatives. What began as a technological marvel has now become a cultural battleground over access, authorship, and the politics of perception.
While the world argued about who could use the deepest black, something else was happening: A quieter but equally radical expansion of the colour universe.
Five years before Vantablack made headlines, a lab in Oregon accidentally stumbled upon a new kind of blue. YInMn Blue — named after its chemical components (Yttrium, Indium, Manganese) — wasn't discovered for art but for durability and energy efficiency in coatings. Still, its brilliance was undeniable. It was pure, bold, stable, and non-toxic, unlike cobalt or ultramarine. This colour generated a lot of curiosity among designers and artists. Here was a blue that didn't just look new; it felt like a missing piece in the spectrum. The hue made you realise something had been absent all along.
And from there, the imagination stretched further. What if there were colours we hadn't even named yet? Enter 'Olo' — a fictional, conceptual hue that lives between known digital colours — not invented. It's more like revealed. 'Olo' doesn't sit neatly in a Pantone book or appear in a screen's RGB settings. It shimmers at the edge of familiarity, changing subtly with light and angle. Like an emotion you can't quite name, 'Olo' is a colour that seems beyond language.
But the story of Olo isn't really about whether it's real. It's about what its idea represents — the ever-expanding edges of human perception. Because colour is not fixed, it's a relationship between light and matter, biology and culture, memory and mood. What we see is shaped not only by our eyes but also by our tools, our technologies, and our collective imagination.
That's why colour discovery still matters — not because we're uncovering new wavelengths of light but because we're learning to see more precisely. And in this discovery, finding ways to articulate subtleties — emotional, perceptual, expressive — that we couldn't until now. Systems like NCS (Natural Colour System) and Coloro help designers describe colours and how they feel.
In design, colour is a strategic tool. It can infuse trust, create urgency or suggest calm — all without saying a word. It influences whether we buy, believe, or feel welcomed in a space. In that sense, colour is a soft-power tool with measurable impact. With new pigments and systems of perception, designers can work with greater nuance. We now have the agency to operate with greater specificity — ascribe colours to mirror the emotional complexity of the consumer. Think of Tiffany Blue — more than a shade, it's an idea of luxury, timelessness, and aspiration. Think of Jio Pink — a colour of energy, accessibility, and youthful confidence. These aren't random choices. They're deliberate emotional codes embedded in visual language. A choice that more brands, creators and experts can continue to use to decode and trigger the desired emotion in the society.
We live in a global attention economy and novelty matters. Discovering a new colour — or naming and standardising one that was previously unformulated — offers a competitive edge. As our emotional and sensory worlds grow more layered, so does the palette we use to express them. New colours — whether lab-born like YInMn, engineered like Vantablack, or imagined like Olo — are not just additions to a colour gamut. They're shifts in consciousness. They give form to new feelings.
We live in a world saturated with colour — in ads, apps, objects, spaces. Yet, we often forget to see it until something jolts us. A sickly green hospital wall. A brand colour that feels 'off.' A sunset we can't quite capture. That's the paradox: Colour is everywhere — but we treat it like background noise. These moments remind us that colour is omnipresent and invisible — always around us, yet rarely noticed unless it misbehaves or surprises us.
So maybe a colour like 'Olo' or a black so black it eats light, isn't just a novelty. Perhaps it's a call for attention. A reminder that perception is fluid. Even in a world where we think we've seen everything, there's still more to perceive. More to feel. More to invent.