Peacocks create color using structural color elements in their feathers instead of pigments.
Colors in Peacocks, such as blues and greens, can be hard to create with pigments. They have evolved structural color to generate iridescent blues, greens, and yellows to address this. They still employ pigments for other colors, but these harder-to-produce colors are created using structure. These structures are nanoscale photonic lattices made from parallel aligned protein crystals resembling rods. The crystal rods are spaced at specific intervals. Layers of rods can be stacked on each other, forming lattices. When light hits the layers, some is reflected while some light passes to the next layer down. As light is reflected off each layer, the time and distance difference creates an interference pattern in the reflected light. These interference patterns produce different colors.
