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Interference coloring of Titanium

Quickstart:
     Titanium can be made colorful for jewelry & identification without pigments or dyes by anodizing it to achieve thin-film interference coloring. Consider the colors of a drop of oil in a puddle or the rainbow reflections from a CD or DVD.
     The anodizing builds a thin transparent film on it; when light hits, part of the light bounces off the top of the film, part penetrates the film and bounces off the metal. The two halves are out of phase, and cancel & amplify different colors depending on the thickness of the film.

Q. Hi,
I would like to know what the process of coloring of Ti. metal through interference coloring called. The problem is if I call it anodizing people mistake it with color anodizing and it gives a wrong impression that I am adding some dye during the process when I am not. Is there any term apart from anodizing for the process.
Thank you,

Mahesh Shervegar
Owner - Mumbai, Maharastra, India
2007

A. Give the process your own proprietary name. Or, call it interference anodizing as it is an anodize process where voltage determines the color. James Watts - Navarre, Florida A. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I'm calling it a duck! It is what it is and no matter what others think, it's still ANODIZE! OK OK, if you must try something else, how about electrolytic coloring -- that's what we call 2-step aluminum anodizing wherein we impart color to anodic layers without the use of conventional organic dyes! Pretty basic description -- coloration of metal using electricity. Milt Stevenson, Jr. Syracuse, New York

Ed. note -- Readers, please search the site for "anodizing titanium" for everything you could want to know about the subject.