> 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.
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.
