Super liquid repellency towards highly wetting liquids is of great interest for fundamental research and practical applications. Superomniphobic coatings have been made by forming re-entrant or doubly re-entrant morphologies that result in contact angles above 150° and contact angle hysteresis below 10°. While existing superomniphobic coatings rely on stringed nanoparticles to make re-entrant geometries, we show that a new type of superomniphobic surface is made by microscale hedgehog particles that combine the features of springtail inspired re-entrant microspheres with cicada wing inspired nanoneedles. Such a bioinspired hedgehog coating shows super liquid repellency from water to low surface tension liquids like dodecane with a surface tension of 25.3 mN m−1. The hedgehog particles provide re-entrant structures and the nanoneedles minimize the local liquid–solid adhesion due to the presence of air gaps. Moreover, we use a one-step approach to make scalable titanium dioxide hedgehog coatings with photocatalytic properties. Thus, the photocatalytic hedgehog coating can be easily converted to slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces under ultraviolet illumination in one-step. Such a photocatalytically activated slippery surface shows an ultralow contact angle hysteresis (≤1°) to highly wetting fluids with surface tensions as low as 16 mN m−1.
