| I shall describe how chirality in liquid crystals can give rise to spatially periodic textures through examples in blue phases and chiral smectics. In the blue phases I shall describe our recent work to understand the behaviour of colloidal particles in these materials and how the cubic orientational order of the blue phases can provide a natural mechanism for the self-assembly of three-dimensional colloidal crystals. These novel materials open new avenues for potential photonic devices as well as offering an alternate mechanism for enhancing the temperature stability of the blue phases. Then I shall describe the emergence of structure in another setting, through the peculiar properties of chiral smectics, and show how a re-analysis of the Landau-de Gennes theory for such systems allows for the possibility of a new periodic texture, sharing an analogy with blue phases, that possesses many of the features of the recently described helical nanofilament (B4) phase of bent core materials. |