Why is gold shiny-yellow but most of the other metals have a silvery color?
In: Chemistry
Materials rarely reflect all wavelengths (colors) of light equally. In gold, there’s a sudden drop off once we reach the part of the spectrum that we call “blue”. This means that colors in the red and green areas are reflected, which combined appear yellow. Silver, for example, drops off in a similar manner, but the drop off point is outside the range of visible light. Since the light we can see is a very narrow slice of the spectrum, few metals have such an uneven distribution. If we could see more of the spectrum, they would look more varied.
Why the reflected light varies in a particular way is more complex than my understanding of physics can explain.
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