You're not seeing this pink. Not properly.
This camera can't capture it,
YouTube can't store it,
and your screen can't display it.
I'm in the studio of artist Stuart Semple,
and he's made what he calls the Pinkest Pink.
I've been painting since I was five years old,
and I've seen a lot of pink.
And thousands and thousands of people have used the pink,
and nobody's said they've seen a pinker pink.
This stuff's really pink.
I've created the pinkest pink, the greenest green,
the loveliest blue, and the yellowest yellow.
I've also created the world's most glittery natural glitter
and the mattest blackest art material in the world.
About a year and a half ago, a company called Surrey Nanosystems
announced that they'd created Vantablack,
which was this really awesome blacker-than-the-blackest-black black
but they gave the exclusive rights to an artist called Anish Kapoor to use it,
and that annoyed a lot of artists,
and I got really annoyed as well.
So I put my Pinkest Pink out.
On the web site I put a disclaimer
that you weren't Anish Kapoor, you weren't associated with Anish Kapoor.
A lot of people thought that was quite funny
and a lot of people bought the pink
unfortunately including Anish Kapoor, who managed to get his hands on it
and then he dipped his finger in it
and put it on Instagram that he'd got the pink.
It was sort of great and sort of really frustrating when he did that,
because all of a sudden we were getting thousands and thousands of orders
we ended up staying up for about four weeks making pink paint
and nothing else could happen
and it just took over our whole life.
There are all sorts of complicated and clever ways that computers can store colour,
but by the time this video reaches your screen
it's basically just a series of numbers that say how bright
to make each of the red, green and blue pixels,
the tiny lights that make up your screen.
And unless you've got a really fancy, expensive screen,
those numbers run from 0 to 255 -- which is eight 1s in binary.
0 means turn the pixel off, 255 means as bright as it can go.
That means your screen can show somewhere around 16 million colours.
But that's not every colour.
And it's not this one.
Because if I pointed this camera at the sun, you wouldn't be blinded.
The numbers can't go above 255, I can't make your screen go brighter than 100%.
And if I point it at something extremely dark, the number can't go below 0.
I can't make your screen any darker than if it was turned off.
In the same way, there are colours that are so intense
your screen can't display them, the pixels cannot go red, green or blue enough.
And this is one of them.
There are massive libraries of pigments,
organic ones, inorganic ones, synthetic ones, created ones, natural ones,
and they've been digging them up since day dot.
'Mummy brown' was made out of ground-up mummies.
So there's a huge database of pigments that you can order.
And you can play with them.
I've made mixes of these pigments and binders,
created something, tweaked it, and gone back and got these relationships right.
So it's quite a complicated little potion, actually.
In a few years' time, technology will move on.
It's already possible to buy expensive equipment with a wider colour gamut,
and that might be able to display this pink.
But in the meantime, I can try and simulate what being here is like.
In this shot, this one here, I've digitally adjusted the saturation of this pink
so it's not quite as intense.
Now if I turn it back up...
Imagine that change, but more so.
That's how pink this pink is.
It is ridiculously pink.
Thank you to Stuart Semple and all the team at his workshop:
pull down the description for more about them, their pigments, and this pink.
This is gorgeous!
I cannot get over how luminous this is.
I started out, like, "well, this isn't doing anything, this is just powder"
and then it just goes!