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?
In: 0
One thing that I’d like to add to the other comments is that the visible spectrum is a small subset of all radiation (with infrared being “redder than red” and ultraviolet being “more violet than violet”; so much so that our eyes can’t detect it).
This means that we have a line, where on one end we have red, and on the other we have violet. However, our color spectrum can be recognized as a circle as well; as you said, it’s the ROYGBV rainbow. So if we take our line of colors, and bend it into a circle, how to we get red and violet to blend into one another?
So, our brain has to interpolate between the colors to make magenta, since it doesn’t have a wavelength associated with it. This is called an [extra-spectral color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_color?wprov=sfla1) if you’d like to know more.
Latest Answers