This week we are featuring camouflage in our weekly flyer. What I find particularly interesting is that something that was adapted from nature to help our soldiers to blend in to their environment has become a fashion that makes people stand out! That's what they call irony.
From the French word camoufl, meaning to disguise, camouflage is technically a method of crypsis (avoidance of observation) that allows an object or creature to blend into its surrounding environment through deception.
While we are most familiar with the military use of camouflage, in fact the natural world has been at it for a much longer time. Both predators and prey make good use of camouflage -- for instance the tigers strips allow it to stock closer to its prey by allowing it to blend with the tall grasses, while many birds, bugs, marine life, and animals use camouflage to hide.
The original military use (according to Wikipedia) was the British in India, when they were forced by casualties to dye their white uniforms to neutral tones. Khaki is a Urdu word for dust and was how they described the muddy tan color they ended up with.
These days camouflage comes in a variety of different patterns and color combinations. Some of the most common are khaki, grey, and blue-grey. They even have a more modern looking version referred to as digital camouflage which uses a pixelated pattern. Hunters will often use a blaze orange pattern which makes the hunter obvious to other humans while making them hard to see to large game animals which see the orange as a dull color.
On the horizon is an interesting twist to crypsis that any fan of Harry Potter or Star Trek will be familiar with -- invisibility materials. Technically referred to as metamaterials, scientists in Boston have developed a way to make a silk-like cloth that literally bends light, making the object covered in the material almost invisible. They claim that with a little more tweaking, it will attain total invisibility.
Naturally this will be a huge leap in camouflage for military purposes (they will literally be able to "cloak" planes and people). Personally I'm more intrigued by the civilian applications and the moral implications of my son being able to slip out of the house without me noticing!
But as soon as they find an application in promotional products you will see them on our site ... wait, how is that going to work?
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