But not your suffering. Richard Webb describes the process for creating Indian yellow in NewScientist (26 May 2018, paywall):
No longer commercially available, Indian yellow was supposedly extracted from the boiled urine of emaciated cows fed exclusively on poisonous mango leaves. A recent chemical analysis seems to support this idea, indicating the presence of both plant and animal metabolites in the pigment.
They also have a video of the blackest black you may ever see.
A trickle of new pigments enters the Forbes collection every year, mostly from the labs of organic chemists. Vantablack is something different – a black so black it flattens reality. Developed by the UK-based company Surrey Nanosystems, it is made of a forest of evenly spaced carbon nanotubes that bounce photons of light between them, eventually absorbing 99.96 per cent. This removes the subtle differences in the scattering of light that give us a perception of depth (see video, below). Even a crinkled foil covered with this shadiest of shades looks pancake-flat (as in the photo above).
