Here’s your lighting vocabulary word-of-the-day, and I’m betting that even if you’re the most hardcore lighting nerd, you haven’t heard it yet: Chromophore.

According to Wikipedia:

A chromophore is the part of a molecule responsible for its color. ^[1] The color arises when a molecule absorbs certain wavelengths of visible light and transmits or reflects others. The chromophore is a region in the molecule where the energy difference between two different molecular orbitals falls within the range of the visible spectrum. Visible light that hits the chromophore can thus be absorbed by exciting an electron from its ground state into an excited state.

If you want to learn more about how color is produced, check out this great website: “Why are things colored?”

Isn’t that a great word???  CHROMOPHORE.  That’s a product or company name just waiting to happen!