Black 4.0 is the blackest paint you can buy

Stuart Semple's Black 4.0 is very nearly as black as Vantablack—and unlike that fabulously expensive coating, developed for the UK's defense ministry and possibly carcinogenic, you can buy a bottle of Black 4.0 for fifty bucks.

Vantablack has a light absorbance value of 99.965%, with Black 4.0 close behind at 99.95%. Earlier models of Black x.0 were only 99.6%.

I covered a laptop (below) in Black 2.0: it was exceptionally dark (and as you can see easily defeats a cellphone camera) but in person still had a faint velvet reflectance that was made worse over time by fingerprints. Even so, I liked the way it made other people in coffee shops look at it with a vague sense of unease. I'm hoping that my Black 4.0 laptop will be genuinely discomfiting for humans to behold.