Cellulose nanocrystals in water suspensions behave as lyotropic liquid crystals form-
ing a chiral nematic phase above a critical concentration. Such an organization can
be retained in solid films and give rise to an intense colored appearance. Here,
we characterize their optical response by applying optical and scanning electron
microscopy, imaging scatterometry, and angle-resolved reflectance measurements.
We show that the experimental results are well explained by computational modeling
using the finite-difference time-domain method, but slightly less well by Berre-
mann’s analytical model