“I Painted An Entire Room With Musou Black”

As a brilliant sentient glob of beef once said, “science is a mystery to man.”

The constant expansion of knowledge and technology has found a way to impact all aspects of life, even those that may be luddites in nature can still feel the effects. Take, for example, color. Seems like a pretty well known thing that’s always essentially been around. But with new studies on light spectrums, new precision in mixing and matching hues, and more—there’s actually a strange proliferation and change in how colors are made, how they appear in certain formats, and how that can affect our lives.

For a while, there was a bit of an arms race in the black paint corner of the world. No, seriously. Different companies were vying for the blackest of paints—that is to say the black paint that absorbs the most light and therefore ensures even more darkness and perfect blackness of the void. That battle continues but right now there is one undisputed champion: Musou Black. Developed by Koyo Orient Japan Co. LTD. (located in Japan), Musou Black absorbs 99% of light. Perhaps that is met with a shrug or the number doesn’t really translate into anything meaningful without better context. Enter…The Action Lab.

James has a PhD in Chemical Engineering and combines his book-learnin’ with a natural curiosity to try all sorts of neat experiments that often combine household materials with some more specialized/cutting edge stuff. For this exercise, he set up a basic room with one light and simple walls, and then painted everything inside that room with Musou Black. That may sound as interesting as watching paint dry, but it is sincerely a trip to see how light is swallowed up in the room—which also means that seeing James also disappears since his visibility depends on light reflecting off his skin and clothes and such. It’s one of those fascinating, nerdy videos that also gets the mind turning into how to use this for film projects, magic acts, and at least three variations of heists. Enjoy!