10 RAREST Colors in Nature

Today I'm counting down the top 10 rarest and most extraordinary colors found in the natural world. Let's start with number 10. Every color on a single tree. The Rainbow Eucalyptus. In the rainforests of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, there's a tree that looks like it was painted by a kid who had access to every color in the box and no concept of restraint. The Rainbow Eucalyptus. This is a tall, fast-growing tree whose bark peels away in these thin vertical strips at different times throughout the year, revealing the fresh bark beneath in vivid bands of bright green. As this bark ages and is exposed to air and sunlight, it starts to transition through a sequence of colors, green to blue, purple to orange, and maroon to brown, before peeling away and restarting the cycle. At any given moment, the trunk of the Rainbow Eucalyptus displays multiple stages of this progression simultaneously, creating a patchwork of neon stripes that runs from the base of the tree to its crown like a living abstract painting. The colors aren't pigments that are applied to the surface, they're the result of chlorophyll in the fresh bark, which produces the initial green, followed by the gradual breakdown and chemical transformation of tannins and other organic compounds as the bark ages and oxidizes. The effect is natural, entirely unpredictable in its specific pattern, and awesome. No two Rainbow Eucalyptus trees looks the same, and no single tree looks the same from month to month because the peeling and aging process is continuous. These kinds of Rainbow Eucalyptus trees have been planted as ornamental specimens in tropical and subtropical regions all over, including Hawaii, Florida, Southern California, and even parts of Central America. They're one of the most photographed tree species on the planet. First-time viewers who see one in person almost universally assume they're just looking at a tree that's been vandalized with spray paint because the colors are almost too vivid and too unnatural-looking to be real. But they are real. The tree just happens to be the most colorful organism in the plant kingdom, and nobody told it to tone it down. Number 9. The Green Sand Beach in Papakolea, Hawaii On the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, at the base of a volcanic cinder cone called Puu Mahana, there's a beach where the sand is green. Not grayish green, not vaguely olive. This is green. A rich, distinctive, almost jewel-toned green that looks like someone just ground up a bag of emeralds and spread them across the shore. This is Papakolea Beach, one of only four green sand beaches on Earth, and the color comes from a mineral called olivine, a magnesium-iron silicate that forms in volcanic magma and is released when the surrounding rock weathers and erodes away, leaving behind these tiny, dense, translucent green crystals. Olivine is heavier than black basaltic sand, and it's lighter than volcanic glass that make up most Hawaiian beaches, which means it accumulates preferentially, meaning the waves wash away the lighter particles and leave the denser olivine grains behind. The effect is most vivid when the sand is wet. A just-washed section of Papakolea Beach gleams in a deep, saturated green that looks artificial, like green glass beads that spilled across the ground. When it's dry, it lightens a bit to a softer olive-gold tone, but the green remains unmistakable. Getting to Papakolea Beach, by the way, requires a two-and-a-half-mile hike across exposed, wind-swept lava fields from the nearest road or a bumpy, unofficial ride in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The remoteness of the journey is part of the experience. The beach sits at the bottom of a partially collapsed cone, accessible only by scrambling down a steep, eroded slope. It's a beach that exists because a volcano erupted, the rock broke down, and the physics of wave-sorting concentrated a single green mineral into a strip of shore that looks like it belongs on a different planet. 8. True Blue – The Color Nature Almost Never Makes Blue is one of the most common colors in our human-built world. We see it on screens, in fabrics, on painted walls, and even the everyday sky. But in the natural world, true blue is extraordinarily rare. Not uncommon, it is genuinely, statistically, biologically rare, and the reason is almost no animal, plant, or organism produces a blue pigment. The blue you see in a morpho butterfly, a blue jay, or a blue poison dart frog, a mandrill's face, or a blue tang fish is not blue pigment, it's a trick of light. The phenomenon is called structural color, and it works like this. The surface of a morpho butterfly's wing is covered in millions of scales, each one containing these layered nanostructures spaced at intervals that are precisely tuned to interfere with incoming light waves, reflecting blue wavelengths back to the observer while absorbing all the other wavelengths. The butterfly is not blue, its wing surface isn't blue, the material itself is actually brown. Crush a morpho wing and the blue disappears entirely, leaving a dull brownish powder. This blue only exists as an optical effect, created by the physical structure on the surface interacting with light, in the same way that a prism splits light into a rainbow. The same trick is used across the animal kingdom. Blue jays don't have any blue pigment, their feathers contain melanin, which is brown, arranged in a structure that scatters blue light preferentially. Blue-eyed humans have no blue pigment in their irises, the color comes from the scattering of light through the colorless, translucent fibers of the stroma. The blue-ringed octopus, the blue lobster, the blue poison dart frog, almost every blue animal is producing its color through structure rather than chemistry. The rare exceptions include some species of Obrina olive-winged butterflies and certain blue-pigmented cyanobacteria. A true blue pigment in animals is so rare, it's considered one of the great curiosities of biology. Plants are kind of similar, blue flowers are uncommon compared to red, yellow, and white, and the blue does appear in flowers like cornflowers, delphiniums, and hydrangeas, and it's produced not by a delicate blue pigment, but by a modified anthocyanin pigment. Red or purple molecules whose color is shifted towards blue by changes in pH, metal ion concentration, that plant is not making blue, it's just sort of hacking its existing red-purple pigments to approximate blue, and the result is often closer to violet or lavender than to true, pure blue. Blue is the color that nature finds hardest to make, and the fact that it appears everywhere we look in the natural world, on wings, feathers, scales, and petals, is one of the most elegant and surprising facts in all of biology. Number 7. Pink Lakes in Australia On Middle Island, off the southern coast of Western Australia, there's a lake that's pink. Not pinkish, not rose-tinted, this is pink, bubblegum, saturated, almost aggressively pink, surrounded by a dense eucalyptus forest and a thin strip of white sand that separates the pink water from the blue southern ocean. From the air, Lake Hillier kind of looks like a pool of strawberry milkshake that was dropped into the middle of a green island in a blue sea, and the contrast is so vivid and improbable that viewers almost universally assume the photographs have been edited, and they haven't, the lake is that pink year-round. Lake Hillier was first documented by British navigator Matthew Flinders in 1802, and it's been pink ever since, through summer and winter, through drought and rain, through almost every seasonal and climatic variation that Western Australia can throw at it. The water retains that color when collected in a glass, which does confirm that the pink is in the water itself, not an optical effect. The cause of the color is not entirely settled yet, despite decades of investigation. The leading theory attributes the pink to a combination of microorganisms, specifically the microalga Dunadelia salina, which produces a red-orange pigment called beta-carotene as a response to the extreme salinity of the lake, and also halobacteria, which are salt-loving archaea that produce a pink-red pigment called bacteria rhodopsin. The interplay between these organisms and the lake's waters produce the specific bubblegum-pink hue that's unique to this lake. Other salt lakes in Australia and elsewhere in the world turn pink seasonally when concentrations spike, but Lake Hillier stays pink permanently, suggesting that its combination of salinity, the microorganisms, and environmental conditions produce a stable, self-sustaining color cycle. The Lake Hillier is pretty difficult to visit. Middle Island is uninhabited and accessible only by boat or helicopter, and tourism to the island is limited. Most people see the lake from the air during scenic flights that route over the archipelago, and the aerial photographs they bring back are some of the most shared and most disbelieved natural images on the internet. A pink lake on a green island in a blue ocean sounds like a painting by someone who's never seen a real landscape, but Lake Hillier is real and has been pink for at least 222 years, and science really can't still fully explain why. 6. CAÑO CRISTALES In a national park in central Colombia, hidden in a remote, mountainous region that was for decades inaccessible, there's a river that turns five colors at once. For most of the year, the Caño Cristales looks like any other clear, rocky river in the Colombian highlands, unremarkable water flowing over a bed of dark stones. But for a brief window each year from roughly June to November, the river transforms into what locals call the River of Five Colors, or the Liquid Rainbow, a flowing, shifting, kaleidoscopic display of red, yellow, green, blue, and black that turns the riverbed into something that looks more like a living painting than a body of water. The color comes primarily from a single species of aquatic plant, Macarania clavigera, a type of river weed found only in this river and nowhere else. During the wet-to-dry season transition, when the water level drops to just the right depth and the sunlight reaches the riverbed at just the right angle and intensity, the plants bloom in an explosion of red and pink pigment that carpets the riverbed in crimson. The red of the plants mixes with the green of the river algae, the yellow of the sand deposits, the blue of the water reflecting the sky, and the black of the volcanic rock beneath, producing a flowing, constantly shifting mosaic of color that changes with every bend in the river. The effect is so vivid and localized, appearing only in this one river during the one seasonal window, that Caño Cristales has become one of the most sought-after natural wonders in South America. Access is controlled by the National Park Authority. Visitor numbers are limited to protect the ecosystem here, and the river is closed to visitors entirely during the months when the plants are not in bloom, a restriction that only increases the mystique of a river that for a few months each year produces a display of color that no other body of water on Earth can match. If you're enjoying the video, please drop a like and a comment down below. It really does help the channel out. Number 5. The Rainbow Mountains in China In the northwest of China's Gansu Province, about 30 miles from the city of Zhangye on the edge of the Gobi Desert, there's a landscape that looks like someone took a mountain range and painted it with watercolors. The Zhangye Danxia National Geologic Park, commonly known as the Rainbow Mountains. This is a 200-square-mile expanse of rolling, layered, brilliantly striped sandstone hills, banded in vivid reds, oranges, yellows, greens, and blues. They're arranged in smooth, undulating formations that look less like geology and more like an abstract painting. Over roughly 24 million years, layers of sandstone and mineral-rich siltstone were deposited in a shallow basin by rivers, lakes, and wind-borne sediment. Each layer contains different concentrations of iron, manganese, and trace minerals that oxidize at different rates and in different conditions, producing these bands of color. Red from iron oxide, yellow from limonite, green from chlorite, and blue-gray from reduced iron minerals deposited under oxygen-poor conditions. The layers were uplifted by tectonic forces as the Indian Plate continued its slow-motion collision with the Eurasian Plate, and the tilted, folded, and exposed layers were sculpted by millions of years of erosion into the smooth, flowing landscape visible today. The result is a mountain range where every hillside is like a cross-section of geologic time. Each color band represents a different chapter in the region's environmental history, a different climate, a different water chemistry, different atmospheric composition. They're all stacked on top of each other and sliced open by erosion for the world to see. The effect from the park's viewing platforms is awesome. Rolling hills striped in orange and red like tiger fur, sharp ridges banded in yellow and green like layers of a cake, and smooth formations where the colors blend into each other in gradients that look airbrushed rather than geologic. The Zhongye Danxia was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009, and tourism to the park has exploded in the years since, driven almost entirely by photographs shared on social media that are so vivid and colorful. The response from first-time viewers is, is this real? Well, it is. The colors are definitely real. The planet made a painting out of rocks, and it's 200 square miles wide and it's been sitting in the Chinese desert for 24 million years. Just waiting for someone to climb to the viewing platform and see it. 4. The Most Beautiful Element on the Periodic Table Bismuth. It's a chemical element, number 83 on the periodic table, sitting next to lead and polonium in a neighborhood of heavy, unremarkable metals that nobody thinks about unless they're studying nuclear physics or maybe treating your upset stomach. In its natural ore form, bismuth is a dull, grayish-white metal that looks like every other unremarkable metallic rock in a geology classroom. But if you melt it and then cool it under the right conditions, it does something that no other element does. It crystallizes into iridescent, rainbow-colored geometric staircases that look like they were designed by an alien civilization. Bismuth crystals form in a shape called a hopper crystal, a structure in which the edges of the crystal grow faster than the faces, and it produces a hollow stepped staircase-like geometry where each successive layer is slightly smaller than the one below it. The result is spiraling squares or rectangles that build outward and upward from a central point, creating a formation that looks less like a crystal and more like brutalist architecture. The shapes are geometric, angular, and they're deeply satisfying to look at. They possess a regularity that is rare in nature, and it triggers the same aesthetic pleasure like fractals and tessellations. But it's the color that makes these crystals genuinely awesome. The surface of a freshly grown bismuth crystal is coated with a thin layer of bismuth oxide, a transparent film that forms as the metal reacts with oxygen. This oxide layer acts as a thin film interference filter, like a light reflecting off the top surface of the oxide film will interfere with light reflecting off the bottom surface. The result is a crystal that displays every color of the rainbow simultaneously. Blues, purples, pinks, golds, greens, and silvers, they all shimmer across the surface in a display that looks more like a piece of digital art than a piece of chemistry. You can grow them at home with relatively simple equipment. The metal has a low melting point, about 271 degrees Celsius, that's about 520 degrees Fahrenheit, which is achievable on a standard kitchen stove. And all the crystallization process requires is nothing more than melting the bismuth in a steel pot and allowing it to cool slowly, and then pouring off the remaining liquid once the surface begins to solidify, revealing the crystal formations growing beneath. The process is pretty simple, but the results are spectacular. And the fact that an element named after a stomach medicine sitting in the unremarkable end of the periodic table between lead and polonium produces the most visually stunning crystals in all of chemistry is one of those facts about nature that reminds you that beauty doesn't always come from where you expect it, and that the most extraordinary things in the natural world are sometimes just hiding in the most ordinary places. Number 3. The Gemstone That Changes Color Alexandrite. It's a variety of the mineral chrysoberyl that does something no other gemstone on earth does as dramatically. It changes color depending on the light. In natural daylight or fluorescent light, alexandrite appears green, a rich, deep emerald-like green that's striking enough on its own. But if you move the same stone into an incandescent light, maybe a candle, a warm lamp, a fire-lit room, the color will shift to red, not pinkish, red, a deep, saturated, ruby-like red that's so dramatically different from the green that first-time viewers routinely suspect they're looking at a different stone. This is caused by the way that alexandrite absorbs light. The crystal structure of it contains trace amounts of chromium. This is the same element that makes emeralds green and rubies red, and the chromium atoms absorb specific wavelengths of visible light in a pattern that's almost perfectly balanced between green and red. In daylight, which is rich in blue and green wavelengths, the green absorption window dominates, and the stone appears green. In incandescent light, which is red and orange in wavelengths, the red absorption window dominates, and the stone looks red. The stone isn't changing. It's just the light changing, and the stone's unique absorption profile means it responds to the change more dramatically than any other mineral. Alexandrite was first discovered in Russia's Ural Mountains in the 1830s. It was named after Tsar Alexander II because of the stone's two colors, green and red. It just happened to match the colors of Imperial Russia. The original Russian deposits do produce some of the finest alexandrite specimens. Large, vivid, with strong color change, but those deposits were largely exhausted by the early 20th century. Fine quality alexandrite has since become one of the rarest and most expensive gemstones in the world, commanding prices that exceed $70,000 per carat from top specimens. Modern alexandrite is mined in small quantities in Brazil, Sri Lanka, East Africa. Most commercial alexandrite shows only a partial or muddy color shift, greenish in daylight, brownish-red in incandescent light, and only a tiny fraction of mined alexandrite displays the dramatic, clean, red-to-green change that defines a world-class stone. A fine alexandrite is rarer than a fine diamond. It's rarer than a fine emerald, too. It's almost rarer than any other gemstone in the world. It's one of those moments where the natural world does something so improbable and so beautiful that it feels less like geology and more like magic. 2. Water That Glows When You Touch It In a handful of bays and lagoons that are scattered across the tropics, most famously in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Maldives, the ocean glows. And I don't mean metaphorically, the water actually glows a vivid, electric, neon-blue-green that erupts from the surface at the slightest disturbance. If you dip your hand into a bioluminescent bay, your fingers will trail streaks of cold blue fire through the water. Throw a stone, and the splash will radiate outward in a ring of light. You swim through it, and your body is outlined in a glowing silhouette, every movement leaving a trail of blue luminescence behind you. This light is produced by dinoflagellates. These are single-celled organisms, about half plant and half animal. They float in the water column in the billions and produce a light through chemical reactions involving a molecule called luciferin and an enzyme called luciferase. When the dinoflagellates are physically disturbed, maybe by a paddle, a hand, a fish, or any other force, the luciferin reacts with the luciferase and produces a flash of blue-green light that lasts for a fraction of a second. One flash from a single dinoflagellate is invisible, but in a bioluminescent bay, the concentrations are so high, millions per gallon of water, that even the gentlest disturbance triggers millions of simultaneous flashes. The most famous bioluminescent bay in the world is Mosquito Bay in Puerto Rico, which holds the world record for the brightest bioluminescent bay on Earth. The unique combination of shallow, warm, nutrient-rich water here, a narrow channel that limits the water exchange with the open ocean, and a dense mangrove forest that supplies organic nutrients to the dinoflagellate population create ideal conditions for sustaining this concentration of these organisms. Other notable bioluminescent bays include Laguna Grande in Fallardo, Puerto Rico, the Luminous Lagoon in Jamaica, and several bays and beaches in the Maldives, Vietnam, and Tasmania, where seasonal blooms produce temporary displays that can last for weeks or months. Kayaking through a bioluminescent bay at night is consistently ranked as one of the most amazing natural experiences. You paddle in in darkness, and every stroke of the paddle ignites a swirl of blue-green light in the water. Fish dart beneath the kayak and leave glowing trails. Drops of water fall from the paddle and hit the surface in a flash of blue on impact. The experience is so visually overwhelming and so alien that first-time visitors describe it in terms that sound more like a hallucination than a nature excursion. The glow is ancient, and the chemistry, too, is old. You're floating through it, leaving trails of light behind you in an ocean that's been doing this since before any human being existed to even see it. Number 1. The Most Colorful Landscape on Earth In the far north of Ethiopia, near to the border with Eritrea and Djibouti, at the northern end of the East African Rift, there's a place that doesn't look like anything else on this planet. The Danakil Depression is one of the lowest, hottest, most inhospitable, and yet most spectacularly colorful landscapes on the This is a basin that sits about 400 feet below sea level, where temperatures routinely exceed 50 degrees Celsius, where the air smells of sulfur, and where the dark ground itself erupts in colors so vivid and saturated and so completely alien that pictures are routinely mistaken for images from another planet. Sometimes people confuse them for digitally generated art or for anything at all other than what they actually are, real pictures that happen to look like the The colors come from a combination of volcanic activity, hydrothermal chemistry, and the conditions of one of the most geologically active places on the planet. The Danakil sits at the junction of three tectonic plates, the African, Arabian, and Somali plates, and the crust beneath it is being pulled apart, thinned out, and heated from below by magmatic activity that produces volcanic eruptions. The result is a landscape that overwhelms. At the Dalol hydrothermal field, the single most colorful spot in the entire Danakil, superheated water rises up through deposits of salt, sulfur, potassium, iron, and other minerals, dissolving them and carrying them to the surface, where they precipitate out as the water cools and evaporates. These minerals form pools, terraces, mounds, and crusts in colors that range from electric neon yellow, that's the sulfur, to vivid acid green, iron chloride, to the deep rusty orange, iron oxide, to even brilliant white, which is salt and potassium deposits. The pools are small, some are only a few feet across, but they are intensely colored, and the contrast between the neon yellow of a sulfur pool, the acid green of the surrounding crust, it doesn't exist anywhere else on the surface of the earth. The Dalol field does also produce some formations that look biological, but they are purely mineral. Mushroom-shaped salt pillars, concentric terraced pools that resemble these miniature rice paddies filled with neon liquid, and bubble-shaped mounds of precipitated minerals, they look like alien eggs hatching from the ground. The formations are fragile, they're constantly changing and perpetually being built up and broken down by the ongoing activity. New pools appear, old pools dry up, and the color palette shifts. No two visits here produce the same view. The landscape is kind of alive in the geologic sense, it's constantly being created and destroyed, constantly producing new colors and new forms from the endless supply of heat, water, and minerals. But the Danakil is not easy to visit. It's one of the most remote demanding tourist destinations. The heat here is extreme, and the terrain is rugged and toxic. The region has historically been affected by political instability and armed conflict too, so visitors travel with armed escorts, camp in the desert, and then the hike to the Dalol field in the pre-dawn hours. But the colors here are worth it. Standing at the edge, you're looking out across a landscape of neon yellow, acid green, rust orange, and crystalline white. A landscape that's steaming, bubbling, hissing, and producing new colors as you watch. The Danakil Depression is the most colorful natural landscape on the planet. It's also the palette nature has ever assembled in a single place. And it's been sitting there, boiling, and glowing, and painting itself in neon at the bottom of a rift valley in Ethiopia for millions of years, long before any human existed to call it beautiful. And long after the last tourist has gone home to show their photographs to people who will not believe they're real.