The lack of cost-effective systems for the extensive assessment of air pollutants is a concern for health and safety in urban and industrial areas. The use of polymer thin films as labelfree colorimetric sensors featuring specific interactions with pollutants would then represent a paradigm shift in environmental monitoring and packaging technologies, allowing to assess air quality, formation of byproducts in closed environment, and the barrier properties of the polymer themselves. To this end, all-polymer distributed Bragg reflectors promises reliable transducers for chemical stimuli, and effective colorimetric label-free selective detectors. We show selectivity attained by specific interaction of the polymeric components with the analytes. Such interactions drive the analyte intercalation trough the polymer structure and its kinetics, converting it in a dynamic optical response which is at the basis of the Flory-Huggins photonic sensors. Additionally, we demonstrate that such optical response can be used to esteem the diffusion coefficients of small molecules within the polymer media via simple UV-Vis spectroscopy retrieving data comparable to those obtained with state of the art gravimetric procedures. These results pave the way to an innovative, simple, and lowcost detection method integrable to in-situ assessment of barrier polymers used for the encapsulation of optoelectronic devices, food packaging, and goods storage in general. Currently, barrier properties of polymer thin films to vapors and gas are assessed via gravimetric 1 and pressure decay methods, 2-4 or by optical techniques based on microscopy 5 and infrared absorption, 6 which remained substantially unchanged for the last few decades. These methods need dedicated equipment and cannot be performed in-situ. In this scenario, research for new low-cost, simpler, and portable technologies to gather lab-on-chip devices is strongly pursued. In these regards, sensors based on the optical response of polymer distributed Bragg reflectors (DBR) represent a possible revolution in the field due to the high responsivity to analytes in the vapor phase. 7-9 DBRs are planar photonic crystals made of media with different refractive index stacked to form a dielectric lattice. The interaction between light and DBRs induces frequency regions where light propagation is forbidden. These frequencies are called photonic band gaps (PBGs), and are easily detectable via simple reflectance or transmittance spectroscopy. 10 In analogy with the energy-gap of semiconductors, the PBG properties depend on the lattice structure. Then, dielectric contrast among the lattice components, lattice parameters, and the number of layers affect the optical features generated by the DBR photonic structure. 11 Intuitively, a perturbation of