Ever wondered why the media’s representation of chemistry and chemists never seems to hit the mark? The choice of stock imagery available might hold the answer.

Chemistry World dips into stock image libraries from time to time. These enormous repositories of images, driven by search engines, aim to provide an image for any and every possible topic you could imagine. The media is the biggest user of stock images thus libraries wield a surprising amount of influence in shaping views and perceptions. One of the larger libraries returns in excess of 215,000 images in response to a search for ‘chemistry’ and yet, surprisingly, there only seem to be seven prevalent categories…