Settle this bet please.
I’m referring to car paint.
Why would it be illegal? 
Well, what I heard is that it’s harder for police to identify a car that can have different colors depending on what angle you’re viewing it at. If the cops are on a lookout for a red vehicle but also happens to be blue at another angle, and maybe even green at another angle it’s alot more difficult.
It sounds like a story I read when I was younger. A career criminal was worried that his fingerprints would betray him so he sliced off the skin on his fingers leaving him nothing but scar tissue. After he became well known, detectives didn’t even need to send his telltale prints back to the lab. His were so screwed up looking that they were instantly recognizable to anyone.
(apologies in advance for not having a solid yes or no answer)
Yeah but the car never looks completely one solid color. It can be mainly red at angle A but have neat tinges of blue and green at the edges. Then at angle B it’s mostly blue but will have tinges of red and green at the edges, and so on. I’d think this would make the car easier to identify, not harder.
Click here to see what I’m talking about. You always see at least two colors at any given time; the angle merely changes which color you see where.
Good point.
What do they call that effect in the world of car paint? ‘Optically active’ or ‘isotropic’ ‘paint’ don’t turn up much information on the stuff. IIRC, someone’s even come out with a voltage modulated liquid crystal car covering, but I can’t find it anywhere.
I had a hard time finding information about it because I didn’t know the term they use to describe it. I did hear about that weird liquid crystal thing though in my searches.
Does such a paint exist? Some paint iridesces but it dosn’t look like a distinctively different color at a particular angle.
Yes, it exists, and it’s quite expensive.
Don’t know what it’s called either though.
I don’t know about illegal but on da streets, this is called chameleon paint.
I believe that House of Kolor was the first on the market with their Kameleon Kolors.
Dupont calls it Chromalusion paint. Jeff Gordon raced a car painted with it a few years ago. I built a model of the car and a 2 ounce bottle of the paint cost me $25. The iridescent properties of the paint have deteriorated since I painted the model.
wouldn’t make much sense to make this illegal; this paint job, as someone mentioned upthread, would be as distinctive as any normal color-- if not more so.
Criminal use of shifting colors pioneered by Johnny Dangerously during a police getaway in the '20s, although they used shelf paper…
I liked the blue with ducks paint scheme, they really blended in then!