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MORPHO

Watch bracelet design developed in collaboration with Alloyed, a 3D metal printing company, presented at Watches and Wonders 2024, Geneva.

In my project Morpho, I was inspired by the nanostructures of a butterfly's wing scales. Butterflies, like the Blue Morpho, live for only one day, yet nature has spent millions of years creating their beauty; each scale acts like a pixel, a tiny part of a larger mosaic, in layers that overlap. This project was about imitating its beauty. By mimicking the shape of the wings, we can create a pigment through movement and light due to its structural coloring. this effect allows multiple colors to exist in a single metallic material. I've magnified this phenomenon for visibility, but in the future, we could use this effect to dynamically change the color of bracelets made from these scales. This opens up endless possibilities for aesthetic variation, all from a single material.

Project in MAS LUX ECAL University of Art and Design
Exhibition at Watches and Wonders
Collaborated with Alloyed
Mentored by Xavier Perrenoud, Anaïs Sulmoni
Video produced by Basil Dénéréaz

RESEARCH

Blue Morpho Butterfly Wings -
There are more than 140,000 species of butterflies and moths in the world, fluttering on every continent except Antarctica. Their wings contain countless patterns and colors, providing critical tools for camouflage, finding mates, and scaring off predators.

How is the structure of the Blue Morpho butterfly similar to a diffraction grating? Structures on the scales of the wing of the Blue Morpho butterfly are tree-like in shape and are arranged in rows. The rows of these structures, act as a diffraction grating which in part causes the blue color.

Butterfly wings have perhaps the most diverse coloration in the animal kingdom. They resemble pointillistic paintings where each point is formed by a coloured scale. A scale generally consists of two laminae connected by pillars. The lower lamina is rather flat and unstructured, but the upper lamina consists of densely spaced ridges, typically connected by cross ribs. Incident light is scattered by the scale structures. The resulting scale’s color is either determined by its structural organization or its pigmentation, or both. The color of an intact butterfly wing is an even more complex phenomenon because the scales are usually arranged in a system of distinct, partially overlapping rows of so-called cover and ground scales.

The wing substrate has in general two scale layers at both the dorsal and the ventral side, and thus light reflected and transmitted by the five elements of the scale stack determines the wing color. Scales of the family Pieridae are beset with pigment granules, or beads, that have a dual function: the pigments absorb light in the short wavelength range, depending on the type of pterin, and strongly scatter light outside the pigment absorption range. Those scale structures are not developed uniformly along the scale. Smooth and abrupt gradients from the base of the scale to the tip have been found in the beaded scales, with the consequent reflectance gradient. Experiments with manipulated overlapping scales show that this gradient has functional consequences for the wing reflectance of the stack and, hence, a reason arises.