alt Hacker News>> To your dye example, yttrium indium manganese blue was the first commercially viable inorganic blue pigment discovered in ~200 years, is the only known environmentally safe one, and was openly published in the literature. It's also under an exclusive license.
Gee, I wonder what was wrong with the previous blue pigments and why it was so important to have this one under an exclusive license.
Cobalt blue is a blue pigment made by sintering cobalt(II) oxide with aluminium(III) oxide (alumina) at 1200 °C. Chemically, cobalt blue pigment is cobalt(II) oxide-aluminium oxide, or cobalt(II) aluminate, CoAl2O4. Cobalt blue is lighter and less intense than the (iron-cyanide based) pigment Prussian blue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_blue
Oh right.
P.S. Don't lick your brushes.
> P.S. Don't lick your brushes.
Cobalt poisoning sounds scary, but I see nothing on the linked Wikipedia page that would present a risk of accidental consumption of medically relevant amounts of cobalt, whether in one sitting or through prolonged exposure.
I mean, I assume Canada stopped adding it to their beer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#Toxicity).
Though the mention of Bolesławiec makes me worried a little; my wife loves their designs and we have a bunch of plates and bowls and such from them, and we serve food on/in them regularly...