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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Magenta is the glue our brains use to roll the light spectrum into a color wheel.
Try imagining it in terms of sound. There’s something it feels like to hear a low noise, and something it feels like to hear a high one. If you hear both at once, nothing special happens – you just hear ‘high and low at the same time’.
‘Magenta’ in sound space would be if there was a totally different sound for this combination of low and high pitches, which didn’t really sound like either of those two elements.
So you’re right that ROYGBIV are just cultural labels that we’ve assigned to different percepts. For example in Russian, ‘light blue’ is a unique color just as ‘light red’ is in English (we call it ‘pink’).
But underneath these labels, the physical nature of light spans an axis. It goes from tiny wavelengths (violet) to long wavelengths (red). This is a linear thing, with two ends – just like sound pitches.
Unlike sound though, the two ends don’t appear opposite and irreconcilable to us. Instead, the two ends of this space combine to create something that feels new.
The reason for this is probably that single sources of sound don’t tend to create extremely different pitches at once, while it’s pretty common for single surfaces to reflect extremely different wavelengths of light.
That’s why, as you note, we see magenta occurring naturally. It’s a somewhat common and useful pattern of light to pick up on that we’ve evolved to see as a unique thing – unlike ‘super low- and also super high-pitched’ noises.
Perception is weird, but useful!
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