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“They’ve made progress in a field that desperately needs innovation, and it looks like they’ve made the jump from the laboratory to the real world. That’s super impressive,” says John Warner, a distinguished research fellow at the company Zymergen and a pioneer of green chemistry, who was not involved in Cypris Materials’ work.

Cypris’s copolymers do this on their own when put into a solution, with the length of the polymer chain determining the wavelength of light reflected.

The new colorants come in a powdered form that Cypris Materials says can be incorporated into manufacturing processes—added to paint in an automotive spray gun, for example, or mixed into nail polish.

Cypris Materials creates structure-based colorants using what are known as self-assembling block copolymers.

But now chemists at a Berkeley, Calif.–based start-up called Cypris Materials say they are closing in on a way to do so.