Twenty years ago, if someone had asked for a material with which they could fabricate a yoghurt pot, as quickly as they could with polyethylene, but had the electrical properties as if it were made of aluminium, both chemists and physicists would have laughed them away. Today, we have conductive polymers which can rival copper as a conductor, and materials which can be processed in simple ways, however, the yoghurt pot still seems a little to technical at present! At the forefront of this field, one increasingly finds polyaniline (PANi). The polymer can be processed [l], and is air stable, making it a good candidate for many electrical applications. Along with these most desirable properties, PANi and its family members also have a large number of interesting optical properties, and it is to these that research groups are now turning. In this lecture, I will review some of the salent points about the optical nature of PANi, and hopefully point out some of the potential avenues that they might take us down in the future.