I got a new laptop recently. It performs well, and it's an attractive, sleek device, with a lid of a deep metallic colour that the company labels as magnesium blue. I never gave it much thought, until today morning, when the protective plastic cover came off, and I could see the blue in all its brilliant glory.
What is magnesium blue? The term doesn't make sense. Magnesium is a silvery white metal; it tarnishes easily in air, reacting with nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water; it burns with a white light, and its compounds are typically white crystals (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium ). So where does the blue come in?
Actually, Google Search will be a good friend to you here. What is called "magnesium blue" or "Mag Blue" is really a proprietary blue paint mix owned by a Japanese company called RAYS Engineering. This company makes, amongst other things, wheels for racing cars. "Mag Blue" is a colour option they offer for these wheels. Check it out: http://www.rays-msc.com/wheels/index.cgi?d=10
What does this have to do with magnesium? Nothing at all. Magnesium is just a fancy qualifier to help us visualize the metallic quality of the colour.
You know those experiments they like to show kids in middle school, where you take a flower of one colour and put it in a jar containing water with some drops of coloured ink mixed in, so that the flower eventually adopts the ink colour? This is somewhat like that. It's like they took the silvery magnesium to provide the metallic finish, and added in titanium and iron to get the bluish hue (that's how we get blue sapphire - titanium and iron impurities in corundum).
So we've probably defenestrated the chemistry, in a very decisive manner. And as a reminder, we have that lovely shade, equal parts beauty and irony, called magnesium blue.
