Close your eyes, now what do you see? Nothing, now imagine that being an actual color. Vantablack is the darkest material ever made; it is so dark that our eyes can barely comprehend it, making it look as if nothing is there.
Color is defined as the way light is reflected off an object and into our eyes, and the different frequencies translate into different colors. Vantablack is technically not a color; it is actually a material. It is made up of tiny, hollow carbon tubes, called nanotubes. Each tube is the length of a single atom, the surface area of 1 centimeter squared would contain 1000 million nanotubes. When light hits these tubes 99.95% of it is absorbed and cannot escape, so vantablack is actually the absence of color.
These nanotubes that make up vantablack must be grown in the Surrey NanoSystems lab. This involves an extremely long and complicated process, and because of this, applying vantablack to an object can take up to two days. The nanotubes are so small and thin that when a human makes contact with them, they collapse under the weight. Because of the smallness of these nanotubes, it gives vantablack almost no mass at all. All of these factors contribute to why vantablack is not able to be sold yet. The process to make vantablack takes a long time and requires extreme heat and other factors, which makes it extremely difficult to make in order to sell. If the process was easier, vantablack is still extremely susceptible to damage, which makes it inconvenient to produce. And even if all of these other factors were eliminated, it would be extremely difficult to get ahold of due to the price. Not very many things would be more expensive than vantablack. It is a lot more expensive than gold and diamond.
The original purpose for creating vantablack was for super technical fields, such as space equipment. Its ability to eliminate stray light made the material ideal for telescopes. But many people are contacting Surrey Nanosystems asking them to use vantablack on things such as wrist watches, smartphones, and high-end car manufacturers. Artists are also extremely interested in having the opportunity to use vantablack on their work in order to create some very crazy works of art. The company is even working with fabric, to see if it is able to be applied to fabric without compromising its physical properties.
But overall it will be awhile before we see vantablack used on anything, due to the continued research and finding ways to apply it to other materials.