Octopus and cuttlefish are masters of disguise. Many species can quickly shift both the color and surface texture of their skin, and scientists have long tried to reproduce that trick using manmade materials. In a paper published in Nature, Stanford researchers report a major advance: a flexible material that swells into new textures and colors within seconds, forming patterns with details finer than a human hair.

“Textures are crucial to the way we experience objects, both in how they look and how they feel,” said Siddharth Doshi, a doctoral student in materials science and engineering at Stanford and first author on the paper. “These animals can physically change their bodies at close to the micron scale, and now we can dynamically control the topography of a material – and the visual properties linked to it – at this same scale.”

The team says the approach could improve dynamic camouflage for people and robots, and it may enable flexible, color-changing displays for wearable technologies. The findings also broaden the possibilities in nanophotonics, a field that precisely shapes how light behaves to support advances in electronics, encryption, biology, and more.

“There’s just no other system that can be this soft and swellable, and that you can pattern at the nanoscale,” said Nicholas Melosh, a professor of materials science and engineering and a senior author on the paper. “You can imagine all kinds of different applications.”