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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> Based on the facebook video, it's not as strongly tinting as either ultramarine or cobalt blue, and it's close enough to cobalt blue in hue that I don't see what the point is unless it's less expensive than what is traditionally one of the most expensive pigments on a palette.

According to the OP:

> Blue pigments, which date back 6,000 years, have been traditionally toxic and prone to fading. That’s no longer the case with YInMn, which reflects heat and absorbs UV radiation, making it cooler and more durable than pigments like cobalt blue.

> “The fact that this pigment was synthesized at such high temperatures signaled that this new compound was extremely stable, a property long sought in a blue pigment,” Subramanian said in a study about the compound.

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Rennaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary, for which ultramarine blue was the traditional expensive pigment, are as vivid today as when they were painted five centuries ago. Mineral pigments like ultramarine (i.e., finely ground lapis lazuli) are essentially perfectly lightfast. Cobalt blue is a metal rather than a silicate but still considered gold standard lightfast where artists are concerned: Chinese pottery has used it for millenia and shown no tendency to change hue. Cobalt blue is toxic but ultramarine isn't.

It's possible that YinMn is similarly lightfast, but the historical blues remain cheaper and more than lightfast enough for virtually any artist concerned with longevity.

As long as stuff doesn't fade for 50 years, are artists bothered? After you're dead, nobody is going to come and complain at you for using a non-durable choice of pigment.

Needless to say,yes artists are indeed bothered about the properties of their paint.

> As long as stuff doesn't fade for 50 years, are artists bothered? After you're dead, nobody is going to come and complain at you for using a non-durable choice of pigment.

I'm sure many artists aren't creating for wholly hedonistic reasons, and instead want to create things that will endure.

A lot of successful artists are very conscious of perservation and archival concerns. It's not just that basic professional level art materials are very deliberately marketed as archival quality: it's a fashion these days to paint on metal surfaces, either sheets of copper, or aluminum composites like Dibond, used by sign painters. Dibond is two sheets of aluminum sandwiching a 2mm layer of polyethylene.

What these surfaces have in common is that they're dimensionally stable: they don't change in size depending on temperature or humidity, and they're chemically impervious to the ground layer. Oil paints can degrade linen canvas over time as the oil seeps into the fibers and oxidizes.

After your dead, no one comes back for you. Instead, your most visible legacy in this world slowly falls apart, changing color, getting brittle, and looking decrepit before it falls apart. Artists aren't invulnerable to vanity.

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