To the probable disappointment of fashionistas everywhere, scientists have taken it on themselves to decide on the new black. And it is (drumroll please): black. But it's a black that's blacker than any black before it. How much more black could you get? As Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tuffnell said of the cover of the band's last album, Smell the Glove: "None more black."

The "blacker than black" substance developed by scientists does not occur in nature; nor is it some sort of paint. Rather, it is a "metamaterial": an intricately constructed array of tiny silver wires embedded in aluminium oxide, which does weird things to the light waves that hit it, bending them in odd ways and sending them in unnatural directions.

Made by a team of scientists led by Evgenii Narimanov of Purdue University in Indiana, the result of this metamaterial is something that reflects almost no light, meaning it looks very, very black. Why would you want such a material? Narimanov tells New Scientist that the primary application of his type of material is likely to be military, specifically in building equipment invisible to radar.

But the next stage – creating metamaterials that can manipulate visible light to the point that objects become invisible to the naked eye – is much harder, as the wavelength of visible light is thousands of times smaller than that of radio waves. So, sadly for Harry Potter fans, it will be a long time before scientists can weave a cloak of invisibility.