First of all, I don’t understand why indigo and violet are split… why not just call it purple? Ok, not my question.
Colors of the rainbow all make sense to me except purple.
Red – orange – yellow…makes sense that orange is between red and yellow, and it’s the combination of those two primary colors, nice transition
This follows with green, blue. Green is between yellow and blue.
Now… if purple aka indigo and violet are a combination of blue and red, how can it be on the opposite end of red (very different frequency) and outside the frequency range of blue? I would expect a secondary color’s frequency to be between the two primary colors that create it
In: 76
So your eyes have 3 types of color sensitive cell – red, green and blue, and all colors are a mix of those right?
However, these cells aren’t perfect. [Your red cells are actually a bit sensitive to UV light off the blue end of the spectrum](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qJxws.png). Therefore when you see UV light both your blue and red cells activate, and it looks purple.
So really it’s just a trick of your eyes that it looks purple, if your eye cells had better color filtering it wouldn’t look purple.
Latest Answers