How much more black could Vantablack be? The answer is none. None more black.

This stuff is the blackest black. It is so black that it makes reality look Photoshopped. Perception of depth and dimensionality disappears into a scotoma of darkness. You look at Vantablack, but nothing looks back at you.

That's not why Vantablack caused an uproar last year. It was supposed to be a specialty product for aerospace and optics. But then engineers at the English company Surrey NanoSystems, the place that invented Vantablack, figured out a cheaper, spray-on version.

Suddenly it wasn't just for techies anymore. Now, theoretically, it could be for anyone. Even artists. Before 2016, Vantablack was a technology. After that, it was a color. And people take colors very personally.

Surrey NanoSystems

Seen and Unseen

Early versions of superblack blacks go back as far as 2007, but Surrey’s discovery was how to make its version at a lower temperature, which made it easier to produce. The "Vanta" is the secret sauce: vertically aligned nanotubules, the teeniest of teeny-tiny carbon pylons arrayed in just the right way to capture light.

The first Vantablack, which Surrey NanoSystems introduced at the Farnborough Air Show in 2014, used a chemical deposition process that laid down the nanotubes, all sticking upward on their ends like blades of grass—a billion of them in a square centimeter. “Light comes in as photons, enters the top of the structure, and then the photons bounce around between the carbon nanotubes and get absorbed and converted to heat, and then the heat is dissipated through the substrate,” says Ben Jensen, CTO at Surrey NanoSystems.

The alignment and density of the nanotubes captures photons from the wee wavelengths of ultraviolet to wide, hot infrared—and all the wavelengths of visible light in between. Then they push that energy out the back as heat. With just the barest fraction of photons that hit the stuff bouncing off, even at a glancing angle, practically none reach a human eye and trigger a human brain. So when you look at something coated in Vantablack, you see a blank. A void. “It’s a nuts material,” Jensen says.

As soon as Surrey NanoSystems introduced it, the company started getting calls. One of them came from an artist named Anish Kapoor. I’m going to come back to him in a moment, but at that point it didn’t really matter, because the process of laying down Vantablack was too difficult to use outside the kinds of places that build space telescopes.