Structural Color vs Pigments? What's the Difference?

Structural color is when something looks colorful not because it has paint on it, but because of how light plays tricks on its surface.

Imagine you have two crayons: one is blue, and the other is white. If you draw a picture with the blue crayon, that’s like using pigments, they’re like tiny little color particles inside the crayon that make things look colored when you see them. It's like putting on a shirt that’s already dyed blue.

Now think about a soap bubble. When you blow it, sometimes it looks like it has rainbow colors, even though you didn’t put any paint on it. That’s structural color, it happens because light bounces around inside the thin film of the bubble and splits into different colors, just like when you shine light through a prism.

• Pigments are like little color helpers that live inside things and make them look colored.
• Structural color is more like a game with light, it uses shapes or layers to create the illusion of color, just like how a bubble makes rainbows without any paint.