I don’t understand the conclusion that magenta doesn’t exist because it doesn’t fall on the ROYGBIV color spectrum. Like how can we say a color that is naturally occurring in nature, that we can see does not exist because it is not on a man-made color spectrum? Why is it not that the ROYGBIV color spectrum flawed instead?
Some say our eyes are tricked into seeing it because it doesn’t exist…why is it a trick if it is how we would naturally see it?
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Color is complicated.
A very simplified understanding of color is that light comes in different wavelengths, and that our eyes and brain translate those different wavelengths to color. Prisms or raindrops can split white light into its different wavelengths, forming a rainbow. The rainbow starts at red, which has the longest wavelength, and progresses gradually to violet, which has the shortest wavelength.
The thing is, while it is true that different wavelengths of light correspond to different colors, that’s *far* from the whole story. Not every color can be traced back to a nice, pure, single wavelength of light. In fact, in nature, it’s very rare that we encounter such pure wavelengths. Instead, almost every surface or light source that we see reflects or emits light that is a mixture of different wavelengths.
This is certainly true for the light that you’re looking at right now: the light coming off your screen. The pixels on your screen mix red, green and blue light to make a bunch of different colors. For instance, if some pixels on your screen are yellow, then actually that’s a mixture of red and green light. So the simplified explanation of “yellow equals some wavelength of light” is obviously not right, because here you are looking at red and green wavelengths of light, and you’re seeing yellow. And it’s not like those red and green wavelengths *physically* combine to make an intermediate, yellow wavelength. Physically, they are still separate: there is both red and green light there. It’s your eyes and brain that make it look yellow.
The reason for this is that you only have three different color-sensitive cells in your eyes. Each of these is sensitive to a different part of the visible light spectrum, although there is also significant overlap between them. Pure yellow wavelengths of light activate both the “green” and “red” cells, but you can achieve the same effect by shining both red and green light on them at the same time. Your eyes cannot tell the difference.
So, really what color is, is the relative activation of your three color cell types. Each of the *spectral colors,* i.e. the colors of the rainbow that are pure wavelengths of light, leads to a different pattern of color-cell-activity, and so we can distinguish them as different colors. But it doesn’t stop there. There are more colors that we can discern. For instance, we can discern darker and lighter colors, and we can discern colors that are more saturated versus those that are more muted. Because these properties of lightness and saturation also lead to different activity patterns of your three color cells.
This means we can see far more different colors than just the spectral colors of the rainbow. Which is funny, because it means that “all the colors of the rainbow” is actually not that many colors. Take brown, for instance, or pink, or grey. They’re not in the rainbow either, but it doesn’t mean they don’t “exist”. They just don’t correspond to a single wavelength of light.
So what does this mean for magenta? Well, magenta is another color that you cannot encounter as a pure wavelength of light. You can only get it by mixing wavelengths that are on the short side (blues and violets) with those that are on the long side (reds) of the spectrum. This ends up activating the red and blue color cells in your eyes. So this is a color that is “in between” red and blue, but it’s not in-between in the same way that e.g. green is, because green wavelengths would activate the green color cells, and magenta does not. And so this wavelength mixture gets interpreted as its own distinct shade of color.
In summary, this is a paradox that only arises from an over-simplified understanding of color. To suggest that a color doesn’t “exist” implies that it has no objective basis. Which would be true if colors always corresponded to pure wavelengths, since there is no magenta wavelength of light. But in fact, the objective basis of color is formed by complex reflectance (and emission) *spectra* of light, and there certainly are such spectra (wavelength mixtures) that correspond to magenta colors.
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