Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2008
Such lovely magenta flowers, aren’t they?
It’s such an odd color, magenta. So bright and vibrant, certainly catches the eye doesn’t it?
There’s one strong oddity about magenta. Look at a color wheel and it’s easy to find, sitting nicely between red and violet just where it belongs. But look at the visible spectrum of light and it’s nowhere to be found. On the other side of red from orange is infrared, and violet has ultraviolet. Both are invisible to our eyes, and neither is magenta.
So, then, what IS magenta? Well, all colors are just a set of wavelengths filtered through our brain, and sometimes the brain has to chose between several very different types of light and come up with a way to show it to us. Put together a violet wavelength and a red wavelength, and our brains just kinda toss them together, call them magenta, and call it a day.
Yellow’s another oddball one. Light works as what’s called additive colors, where when you mix together all the colors you get white. (Paint works the opposite way, with mixing leading to black.) Red and Blue makes magenta, which makes sense, as does blue and green making cyan. But then you get to the third of the trio. Red and Green mixed together make Yellow. Now, the green kinda makes sense. We’re used to mixing yellow and blue paints together to get green, after all. But red? Really? There’s nothing inherently Yellow about Red. And yet, every single patch of yellow you’re seeing on your computer screen is actually just a mix of red and green light, so it works somehow.
The brain needs to process a lot of data and make it simple to understand somehow, so I guess inventing strange colors to deal with a grab-bag of wavelengths makes as much sense as any other option.
I have noticed that the oddball colors like magenta and yellow tend to look more vibrant to us. It’s probably related, where our brain’s just having a minor freakout about the color and going “Would you look at this mix!?! What am I supposed to do with this!? Seriously, just look at it!”
