Color blind

The United States Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the US Food and Drug Administration, banned artificial food colorings last month. This led to food service companies scrambling to find alternatives to synthetic food dyes.

Stella’s Homemade Ice Cream in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, recently announced it will be phasing out artificial food dyes and start using natural colorings, Fox News reports.

Owner Haley King told Fox the shop has been experimenting with blue spirulina, turmeric extract, and purple carrot juice to color its ice cream. One flavor, mint chocolate chip, has natural dyes, she said, which do not affect its taste.

If food makers are facing a shortage of allowable dyes, scientists have claimed the discovery of a new color.

Researchers at the University of California led by Prof. Ren Ng announced the discovery in the journal Science Advances on 18 April.

The article called the new color “olo,” which the discoverers described as “more saturated than any color that you can see in the real world,” BBC reports.

Unlike ordinary colors, however, olo cannot be seen by the naked eye. A device called Oz, which consists of mirrors, lasers and optical devices, was used in an experiment to detect the new color.

The Oz shone a laser beam into the pupil of one eye of each experiment participant. “The laser stimulated only the M cones in the retina, which in principle would send a color signal to the brain that never occurs in natural vision,” the paper said, according to BBC.

Each participant then verified the olo by adjusting a controllable color dial until it matched the new color — a saturated shade of blue-green, BBC said.

Ng and his team are considering using the method to help color blind people.