The strikingly colorful world of insects is in large part the result of light interacting with periodically organized biopolymeric structures incorporated into wings, hairs and exoskeletons. Such structural colors have recently gained tremendous interest as photonic crystals with their ability to control the behavior of light in revolutionary new ways. This highlight article reviews recent developments in employing biological structures as unique templates for the fabrication of inorganic photonic crystals. Different biotemplating methods, including atomic layer deposition, conformal-evaporated-film-by-rotation and sol–gel chemistry, are introduced and discussed. Under optimized conditions these methods produce high-fidelity inorganic replica structures with improved sensing, light emission and photonic band gap properties.