“No matter how much people enjoy looking at it, blue is a difficult color to harness from nature. … Plants seldom produce blue hues. When they do, their pigments rarely remain stable after extraction.” (There’s indigo, of course, but any friction on the fabric causes it to fade.) Molecular chemist Erick Leite Bastos writes about how he and colleagues found a way to derive the pigment he named BeetBlue from the red root vegetable. – The Conversation