Liquid crystals are fascinating functional materials, and are important in advanced materials fields such as electro-optic devices. Organic liquid crystals are diamagnetic and can easily be oriented by an electric field. It is possible to align liquid crystals by a magnetic field in a manner analogous to alignment by an electric field. The construction of metal-containing liquid crystals (metallomesogens) has recently attracted a great deal of attention.[1±6] Strong magnetic fields are necessary to align diamagnetic liquid crystals. On the other hand, metallomesogens containing unpaired electrons are paramagnetic liquid crystals, and the magnetic field strength required to align paramagnetic liquid crystals is much smaller than that required to align diamagnetic liquid crystals. An investigation of magnetic liquid crystals containing rare-earth ions (which are of interest because they often have a large magnetic anisotropy) has been reported. [1] Furthermore, polymeric compounds with nickel(II) side chains have been synthesized; these exhibit cooperative magnetic properties toward constructing ferromagnets with liquid-crystal properties.[3] Therefore, liquid crystals that can be controlled by external fields have been developed. Recently, Galyametdinov et al. reported a spin-crossover iron(III) compound (S = 1/2 « S = 5/2) with liquid-crystal properties.[6] When the magnitude of the intermolecular interactions overcomes a threshold value, spin-crossover occurs. In such a case, the transition between the low-spin and high-spin states is not only very abrupt, but it also occurs with a hysteresis effect. [7] Designing molecules exhibiting bi-stability is one of the main challenges in molecular materials science, in order to utilize them for information processing and storage.[8]Furthermore, multifunction spin-crossover compounds with a supramolecular structure of porous material have been designed, and are of interest because of their specific magnetic or optical properties. [9,10] For some iron(II) spin-crossoverÐhigh-spin (S = 2) « low-spin (S = 0)Ðcompounds, light-induced low-spin ® high-spin conversion can be observed by greenlight illumination into a d±d or MLCT (metal-to-ligand charge transfer) absorption band at temperatures well below the thermal transition temperature. A mechanism for this phenomenon, denoted as ªlight-induced excited spin-state trappingº (LIESST), has been proposed. [11,12] The development of novel compounds exhibiting LIESST is one of the main challenges in this field. [7,13,14] LIESST compounds can be used as opticalswitching molecular devices, and various functional materials including the optical switches can be constructed. Herein, we focus on the use of spin-crossover iron(II) compounds to control liquid crystals not only by temperature, but also by magnetic field and photoillumination. Spin-crossover iron(II) compounds exhibit spin conversion between diamagnetism (S = 0) and paramagnetism (S = 2), and the LIESST effect. The design of metallomesogens containing spin-crossover iron(...