“Impossible” colors

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So I’ve been seeing a lot about these colors that aren’t supposed to exist apparently? Like magenta, stygian blue, etc and I kind of get what’s going on but also kind of don’t? I’ve seen explainations of this on the internet before but never fully understood, so if anyones able to help with that I’d appreciate it. Don’t want a watered down explaination (I like technical stuff), just a more understandable and approachabe one

In: Physics

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Magenta and pinks in general are what you get when you mix purples and reds.

In school, colors are generally presented as a wheel, with each color smoothly blended into the next. In real life though, color is created by waves of light and the wavelength determines the color. The shortest visible wavelengths look like purple and the longest ones look like red. You can’t just mix short and long wavelengths together though, medium wavelengths look like orange, yellow, green and blue.

Basically, the spectrum of color is linear, not circular, so how can you make a new color out of the two opposite ends?

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