Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A globe-trotting quest to find blue in the natural world—and to understand our collective obsession with this bewitching color

Blue is a rare color—natural blue, that is. From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue—and most that appear so are doing sleight of hand with physics or complex chemistry. Flowers modify the red pigment anthocyanin to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light.

Yet this hard-to-spot accent color in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. His quest to find and understand his favorite color and its hallowed place in our culture takes him to a gene-splicing laboratory in Japan, a volcanic lake in Oregon, and to Brandenburg, Germany—home of the last Spix’s macaws. From deep underground where blue minerals grow into crystals to miles away in space where satellites gaze down at our “blue marble” planet, wherever we do find blue, it always has a story to tell.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Where do you fall on this infographic?

A solid plurality of the world's people are fondest of the color blue. (Red's my choice.) The amazing thing is, this is a really rare color whether as a pigment...a substance that stays blue even when altered...or as a structural color, when the way a surface reflects and/or refracts light causes the eye to perceive it as blue.

Blue light is rare on the surface of the Earth. Green is, as I imagine you can suss out, the most common color of light down here. That's how plants can afford to reflect it, so we see their leaves as green.

Cornflower blue is a very satisfying color, but I still prefer the stem myownself. The Table of Contents gives you a good, solid feel for this book's modus operandi. You're going to see beautiful images throughout, of course, but they're llustrating concepts about color, how it is made, seen, and used in the natural world.


Rocks are the primary sources of blue pigments. They are not always stable in their blueness, with many things impacting that stability. The kind of light and the amount and humidity of air the pigments are exposed to can impact the stability of the color perceived by our eyes.


Animals apearing blue to our eyes are using structural color, the kind that relies on properties of the surface of the animal to show as blue. Changing a factor in the environment, or simply moving one's angle of view, will cause the color to change or disappear.

The surface now being scratched, I hope you can appreciate the subtle way a color comes to exist in your mind is the actual subject of this book. Kai Kupferschmidt is a science journalist based in Berlin, with degrees in molecular biomedicine, so he's a reliable guide to the science he's discussing. What he isn't is a boring writer. He's equally facile at disccussing Picasso's Blue Period and how our eyes do the work of showing us color.

This book gets my vote for going into the stocking of young artists, biologists, physicists...reall, anyone who loves blue, likes learning, and can appreciate a beautiful browsing book that also repays solid reading time. ( )

3.5 rounded up to 4 ( )

I was surprised to be sent this ARC since I don’t review a lot of nonfiction, but it was a joy to read. If you are interested in chemistry, art, or history then this book about the color blue might be up your alley. There is a lot of chemistry throughout the book as the author goes into detail about how certain paint shades of blue were discovered over the years. There is also a discussion about the blue and how the word is used in different cultures. It also goes over the chemistry of blue in flowers and animals. This is a translation from a German edition that came out a few years ago and I am glad it was made available to English readers. This would be a great gift book for a science loving person in your life.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss
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New works of popular science nonfiction are examining fascinating scientific themes through entertaining stories. Educators will find these useful in identifying timely examples for their classrooms.

Blue: In Search of Nature’s Rarest Color
Kai Kupferschmidt, Jul 2021, The Experiment, an imprint of Workman
Themes: science, physics, optics, light, color

BLUE take readers on an adventure around to globe to identify examples of this rare color in minerals, animals, and plants. It also examines the science behind the color blue and its impact on human life.
Take-aways: Occurring less frequently in nature than other colors, blue is a color associated with both science and social science topics. ( )

Throughout history, blue is the rarest color in the natural world. People have searched for, fought for, and wasted fortunes on finding a true natural blue. The historical demand for blue has been so great that alchemists and scientists pursued artificial ways to create the color. Resulting patents abound. What is the allure of the color blue? Why is it so hard to find?
Journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has spent his life drawn to the color blue. Now he draws his readers into his world of meticulous of searching and researching the color and the role it has played in society. I have always be fascinated by colors and have read several books about pigments. Kupferschmidt has shown me that my prior knowledge was only scratching the surface of color. I highly recommend this for those that enthralled with pigments and their origins.
I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.
#Blue #NetGalley ( )