Why is dirt almost always a brown color?
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The same reason that if you mix every color paint in the box you’re going to end up with brown. Brown is simply “the color of lots of different colors mixed together”.
Pro-ELI5/anti-pedant note: we’re talking pigments here, not frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.
And here’s me thinking dirt is usually black. It really just depends on the local geology, climate and flora.
From my arts background, I’d say it’s because you just about mix any colours together and it really doesn’t take long before you end up with brown. Brown being a tertiary colour, which you get from mixing at least three primary colours together (of course dirt is made up of many components)
Thinking on it more, dirt is usually made from plant matter, which is already brown (bark, wood), or green/yellow/red (mix any of these colours and the pigment looks some shade of brown!), As well as minerals like silicone (white- wouldn’t effect the hue of dirt only the tint), or granite, iron, nickel, so on.. which if you think about most are greyish or reddish colours.
So again it depends on the composition of the dirt but it does come down to the fact most of these colours mixed up just end up brown.
As a color nerd, I can tell you brown is more a type of color.
Brown can be anything from a dark orange, to a grey-ish purple, to bright greyish red, or even just straight up grey, surrounded by colors that somehow make it look brown.
If you’ve ever drawn digitally, and couldn’t find brown in the color wheel, this is why.
Primarily due to oxidation. The same process that turns an avocado brown when you cut it and leave it exposed to oxygen. Many elements in soil also change color while oxidized. As a geologist I tend to see browner soils predominantly near the surface or a characteristic of young soils that have more recently been deposited (like alluvial soils). Topsoils tend to be very dark brown because they contain a lot of roots which makes the soil porous and therefore aerated. Also they are organic rich which adds to the darker brown to black color. Also deeper soils that drain well tend to be brown like sands since they don’t hold onto water they get more exposure to air.
Dirt isn’t almost always a brown color. It can be black, grayish, reddish, tan, and all colors in between, depending on where you are geographically and the climate.
https://www.geologyin.com/2016/09/relationship-between-soil-color-and.html
There are already a lot of pretty good attempts at answers, but the simple reason is it’s essentially just poo. Poo from me, poo from you. Poo from frogs, and poo from dogs.
And that’s why it’s brown.
*Albert H. Munsell rolling in his grave*
I’m an archaeologist, so I do a lot of digging. Part of that is to record the color of soil changes so we can judge how intact or disturbed a soil layer is. To record the color, we have to use a Munsell Soil Color Book. There we have a wide range of browns, from red to yellow to black to pink, even green and white.
You ever notice how brown isn’t on the color wheel? There is no brown in the rainbow. It’s because brown is what they call a tertiary color. You gotta mix at least three colors together to get it. Dirt is a mix of all sorts of different elements, minerals, organic compounds. So the result, is generally some hue of brown.
The real answer is brown is what you get when all colors from the light spectrum are absorbed and reflected randomly. Take paint a bunch of varying colors and start mixing them up. Eventually you’ll get to brown.
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