Based on the idea that “Color is a part of design”, Mazda pursued expressions to make the Kodo “Soul of Motion” Design look more beautiful. So far, we have mass-produced Soul Red Premium Metallic, Machine Gray Premium Metallic, and Soul Red Crystal Metallic as colors that symbolize the brand. We have developed Rhodium White Premium Metallic that achieves both “fine metallic texture” and “whiteness” as a color that provides customers with new value in line with the evolving Kodo design. This paper presents a technical overview of the development process.

Recently, solid-state luminescent materials have become indispensable functional materials for our daily lives as OLED displays and lighting devices. Therefore, developing solid-state fluorescent molecules has attracted much attention. The authors found that the appropriate introduction of fluoro-substituents into non-fluorescent tolane leads to blue, yellow, and red-fluorescent molecules that fluoresce in the solid state via controlling their electronic and aggregated structures. Here, we outline the solid-state fluorescence properties of various fluorinated tolanes and their correlation with molecular structures, as well as their application to white fluorescent materials utilizing the additive nature of blue and yellow fluorescence.

A new dental restorative material has been developed using structural color to match a wide range of tooth shades with just one shade. Conventional dental restorative materials include multiple pigments to match tooth colors. We focused on inorganic fillers, mainly spherical silica-based composite oxide particles made by the sol-gel method. The results showed that when spherical particle with a particle diameter of 260 nm was blended into the composition, it exhibited yellowish to reddish structural color and excellent color-matching ability for various tooth shades.

The Act on Recycling of Specified Kinds of Home Appliances obliges the recycling rate for four types of home appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, TVs), and material recycling of plastics is an important technology to improve the recycling rate. Our company has succeeded in achieving “closed-loop recycling from home appliances to home appliances,” in which Polypropylene (PP), Polystyrene (PS), and Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene copolymer (ABS) are sorted and collected from used home appliance plastics. Many white plastic parts are used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and washing machines. It is considered that whitening of recycled plastics is essential to expand the application of recycled plastics. In this paper, the following whitening methods of recycled plastics are introduced: removal of dark flakes by color sorting, polishing of the plastic surface by surface friction polishing, and coloring by titanium dioxide.

Léonard Foujita was an oil painter active in the first half of the 20th century in France. His paintings of nudes were called “Grandes fons Blancs” (Splendid White) and attracted attention for their milky-white, transparent, and unique expression of skin texture. In this study, we focused on the fluorescence emission of white pigment and estimated the spatial distribution of white pigment on the painting surface by analyzing the fluorescence emission of Foujita's painting “Nude on Bed with a Dog” captured by the hyperspectral camera.