The first blue pigment discovered in 200 years is now commercially available

According to the article "YInMn Blue has been approved for US use in industrial coatings and plastics since September 2017", so saying that it has seen zero years of human use is not quite true.

Chemistry - either organic or inorganic. We already know what is responsible for the colors of molecules. So you can build new molecule or complex based on those principles and some of them turn out to be scientifically interesting or commercially valuable.

Is this ok?

>Yttrium is mostly dangerous in the working environment, due to the fact that damps and gasses can be inhaled with air. This can cause lung embolisms, especially during long-term exposure. Yttrium can also cause cancer with humans, as it enlarges the chances of lung cancer when it is inhaled.

>Indium compounds are encountered rarely by most people. All indium compounds should be regarded as highly toxic. Indium compounds damage the heart, kidney, and liver, and may be teratogenic.

https://www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/y.htm

Guessing if you’re a chemical engineer it’s one of those properties you’re keeping an eye out for?

> How would you know what you’re looking at is novel?

Pigments are chemicals. Chemist can use various techniques to analyse a sample and tell what is its composition. After that they search for it in the literature and if they find that the given chemical was not described previously then it is novel. That’s it.

> I don’t get it, how would you even discover a pigment?

The article answers this. “ Chemist Mas Subramanian and his team serendipitously came upon it while conducting experiments with rare earth elements as part of their work with semiconductors.”

That is to say they were experimenting and something turned out as blue. They didn’t expect this so they analyzed the sample and then did a literature search.