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If you've spent any time shopping for mascara, you're well aware that every new shade is blacker than the next.

From "Blackout" to "Carbon Black," to "Pitch Black," to "Blacker Than Black," each fancy name attempts to one up all others, often touting a new pigment that's reportedly the blackest black possible.

But now, it exists.

A new material has been created that really is the new black.

You see, to be truly "black" a substance must absorb all light that hits it. Until now, even the blackest blacks reflected back just a little light. But a new metamaterial absorbs virtually all the light that hits it.

Metamaterials are a class of substances artificially engineered to have properties that are not normally found in nature; they're made up of tiny components that are smaller than the wavelengths of the light they interact with.

"New Scientist" reports that Evgenii Narimanov of Purdue University realized that it should be possible to design a metamaterial with the right internal structure to absorb all of the light in a particular range, making an object created from such a material perfectly black.

According to the scientists, the main focus for metamaterial is military, for use in "stealth technology in the gigahertz range," which is geek speak for building equipment that's invisible to radar.

But we think it has a bright -- or should we say dark -- future in beauty. We can envision the packaging now: "Meta-Mascara, The Blackest Lashes Physically Possible (And Invisible to Radar!)."

It would be favored by beauty buffs searching for the end-all-be-all mascara, and of course, fashionable spies.

Speaking of great mascaras, check out the newest lash innovations for summer.