Tumblr Users Freak Out That Magenta Is Not A Real Color And That Impossible Colors Exist
Tumblr users often find things to discuss and argue over. Yet sometimes, one user or another digs up something that other people don’t know and it starts a conversation where some express their disbelief while others try to shed some light on the subject to make it more understandable to the general public. Sometimes the users on the blue social media site band together to discuss survival bias and how it affects our lives, other times they try to explain how there is an ethical way to consume eggs and other produce.
This time Tumblr users gathered to discuss whether magenta is actually a color and if it exists. One user posted a strip of color asking for everybody’s opinion on “this shade of pink” and once another person responded by saying that it’s magenta and it’s not, in fact, a color, people truly lost their marbles.
One Tumblr user asked people what they think about magenta and it unleashed a wild discussion
According to Wikipedia, magenta is “is technically not a color, it has no wavelength of its own although it is classified as a color by many and it is easier to call it one.” And there is a lot of science behind it. Either way, pretty impressive what our brains come up with to explain things that don’t actually make sense or have no physical counterpart.
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If you're seeing magenta as blue then you likely have a lack of red receptors.
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Here's another wild bit of vision information that can kind of mess with your mind, so proceed at your own risk: We see our own nose AT ALL TIMES. Our noses are never not in our line of sight, but our brains have learned to block it out through something called unconscious selective attention. That way it isn't constantly distracting us. Good luck on forgetting that soon and going back to not seeing your own nose. :)
I see (notice) my nose all the time. I guess my brain is broken.
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I guess Pantone has some work to do with #d0417e then. Next they’ll be telling me that Octarine isn’t a real color either. 🧙🏻♂️
Pantone is an industry principle with the sillo requirement of printing ink on a surface with a consistent result. Pantone colors are only ink tha are pre mixed together based on mixing 10 different colors instead of of the four-color mix (CMYK) which is also an industry principle based on material color mixing(ink) as opposed to light color mixing(like a screen). RGB is used to describe the color emitted by a source of light.
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So if everyone's brains are just interpreting what the color yellow is supposed to be, then does everyone actually see a different color that everyone else? My brain makes it slightly more of one shade than someone else's? Does that make sense?
Remember the "dress" fiasco? Yeah, we interpret light bouncing off stuff differently depending on the way the rods and cones in our eye are arranged.
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The first time I looked at something that was covered in Vantablack, I was convinced I'd never see anything ever again. Seriously. If finding out magenta isn't a real colour freaked you out, go look at Vantablack. That s**t will swallow your soul.
Or black3.0. At least, if you're not Anish Kapoor
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This is off topic, but does anyone miss when people used to spell out words (or at least try) in their entirety? Reading the first sentence of this post and I'm already lost. Oh well, it is what it is I supposed. Anyway, I like magenta.
I refuse to use the abbreviations (not online, not in emails, not in text messages, not anywhere) out of principle.
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I think it's a "real colour" in the conventional, non-scientific understanding of colour. Like, if you can make a pigment of it, it's a colour.
I am a woman with a colorblind dad and passed on his gene to both of my sons. There is some experimenting that women carrying this gene may actually have a 4th cone??? We've been experimenting .......how we perceive color. I am an artist and color has always been my forte. I believe I could mix up what is known as magenta with a pallet of paint. It's interesting. As long as they can at least stop or go at the stoplights and such, I don't worry all that much, I do feel bad that they can't see colors the way I do, and god love em' they do try to guilt me about the gene thing..cest"la vie ....the rest is kind of a matter of perception. ;-)
Look, if magenta isn't a color because it's not on the rainbow (i.e. doesn't have a specific wavelength), then white, pink, brown, beige, cyan, and black aren't colors either. The purpose of language is to communicate with other people, so why would you insist on this weird definition of a word that 99.99% of English speakers would disagree with?? Sometimes a specific technical field has a more precise meaning of the word than the casual usage of the word, but that doesn't seem to be the case here, since nobody has identified that field.
I thought black was a lack of color & white was all colors.
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It's a bit click baity and exaggerated to call it fake. Firstly, a color can certainly be a mix. Secondly, although seeing a color is a first person experience, it is anchored to some objective reality, which in this case is the stated mixture of red and violet. The fact that we can talk about it at all proves it is very "real."
The point is that magenta is not a mix. It has no wavelength. Most colors we see are indeed mixes, averages of multiple wavelengths, like the yellow example given in the article, but magenta is not.
Load More Replies... But by the same token, black isn't a color either, because that's not on the rainbow.
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But what about additive light colors? Ie when you combine magenta and green, you get white light. ? Magenta is the opposite of green in additive color. That's what we were taught in my physics and optics of photography class.
Photography and this dont correlate. A light prism and the rainbow doesnt give 2 shits about additive colors.
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The ancient Greeks did not have a word for, or concept of, what we call blue. Pink is another color that doesn't exist on the spectrum and the color is named for the flowers which have an uneven or 'pinked' edge. And originally it was the color for boys. Blue was for girls. The fruit came before the color orange. The sun is actually white. And pencils are yellow because that was the royal color in China where the best graphite was produced.
There are three primary colors on the color wheel: red, yellow, and blue. When you mix these colors you get the secondary colors: red + yellow = orange ( more red in the mix = red - orange), yellow + blue = green ( again it can be yellowish green or blue- green), blue + red = purple (violet) hue when there is more blue than red in the mix; and when there's more red then blue you get red-violet or magenta, or fuchsia. And all kinds of other hues when you mix primary colors with secondary colors, or two (or more) secondary colors together, the sky is the limit. Then there are neutral colors: white, grey, beige, brown, and black. That's in interior design, fashion. Was wad discussed in this post were colors in photography.
I am what you call a Master Printer. <- Back when you had actual film and negatives. This is (excluding the cursing), the best explanation of colour theory I have read in years. BRAVO!
Magenta, just like Cyan is part of the additive CMYK colour separation (adding to Black). Not to be mistaken with the negative system used on TV (adding to White). This article is wasting a lot of time denying colours such as Chartreuse, etc,.... Where do we stop! Those colours can all be perceived and used. What a load of bull.
What!? All this time there are really no Magenta or Stygian Blue? What next my neighbors are not really there? :-(
So, if it doesn't exist, and our brains are just making it up - how do we know we all "see" the same "colour" when we look at one of these fake colours? My brain might perceive magenta, but the other guy perceives yellow. How would we ever know? PS - This thought has bugged me since I was little. Good to know there is actually some science behind it.
I didn't realize that everyone sees colors differently (aside from color blindness) until a few years ago and I'm 56. One of my twins was standing next to me and I said something about the yarn I was crocheting with. He saw it as pink and I saw it as orange. His twin agreed it was pink so we called in their older brother who saw orange like me. We then turned to my purse which I saw as brown and they saw as gray. It's rather eye opening to realize we are all moving through the world seeing things very differently.
i am not afraid to say i have spent 10 minutes googling this and texting my friends, "did you know". half of them say shut up and 'if you can't see it, who named it? a blind man? and i have nothing....
Cats can't see reds/pinks too well. Dogs see the spectrum as brown-gray-blue. Birds can see ultraviolet. I think the perception of magenta is really not worth any existential angst... Especially on a Monday!
It's like that statement that a mirror doesn't reflect anything when nobody is looking. Or a falling tree making no sound when nobody is around to hear it. I think everything we see or hear is what our brain interprets for us, and is only a fraction of a much larger picture anyway.
But those statements are wrong. A mirror does reflect light even when nobody is looking at it. And a falling tree does generate a compression wave that propagates through air, even when nobody is around to detect that wave.
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I work in print and we only use colors. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black. And if you want to get technical Black isn't a color.
Next, let's talk about the other fact that brown doesn't exist either!
This must be what they mean when they say that a person dyed their hair a color not found in nature.
Red, Blue an YELLOW are Primary colors so yes Yellow does exist, yellow and blue make orange. But that is in color theory (an artist would know what that is). Whoever wrote this article is an idiot who likes to use F * CK way to much.
The article states that yellow exists, it's simply that our eyes don't have rods to perceive it, so our brains have to make up what it looks like.
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The reason people are freaking out is because they are mixing "color" with "pigment". "Color" is what you see in a rainbow or a prism. If you cant see it there, it is not a "color"... colors only exist when you can mix with another color right next to it on the spectrum. Thats why you cant mix Purple with red... they are on opposite ends. "Pigments" are what you get when you mix colors that are not next to each other. So is magenta a color? NO. But it is certainly a pigment. There are lots of "pigments" that are not colors. Its like that high school riddle. All colors are also pigments, but not all pigments are colors.
That's ridiculous. Color is a combination of wavelengths. It doesn't have to be on the rainbow (i.e. a specific wavelength). Black is a color. White is a color. Pink is a color. Beige is a color. (And I *am* a physicist.)
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I learned a bit of this when I researched purple. Purple is my favorite color, yet it is rarely seen in nature. We see violet in nature, which to me looks kinda like another shade of blue. So I couldn't help but wonder, does real purple even exist? So I googled if it's real and turns out, not really. The rainbow doesn't even have any true purple. Purple is just what our brain interprets red + blue as. It doesn't have it's own separate light wavelength, which makes it a fake color
Are you saying black and white are false colors? Because those don't have specific wavelengths.
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They keep talking about mixing red and violet. Violet is purple (to people under the age of 80). I was taught in kindergarden that purple was red and blue mixed together. So, magent is red and red and blue mixed together? As far as perceiving it, to me it looks like light purple. It's just a shade of purple. I've never gone in for describing every tiny difference in shade of a color by a different name. (Not good at it) There are 6 colors to my eye: Yellow, blue, red, green, orange, purple.
But this was very interesting! I love these types of posts on BP.
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And y'all ppl fight over what clothes look good on u in which colour. Really u ppl just need. To take a nap. Much better than fashion show and what not It's really funny ppl giving so much importance to things, that is just literally the guesswork of ur brain. And ur brain says f**k it, it's not important. Gods looking at girls fighting In a sale makes me worried about the evolution of the species.
Colours are damn fun, and there are combinations that look better than others.
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It doesn't really matter, generally, it's just fascinating to learn these things.
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That's not at all the whole story summed up. It's like you skimmed this post or something.
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The "friend" on the end of that really doesn't do you any favours
Load More Replies... If you're seeing magenta as blue then you likely have a lack of red receptors.
Load More Replies... Here's another wild bit of vision information that can kind of mess with your mind, so proceed at your own risk: We see our own nose AT ALL TIMES. Our noses are never not in our line of sight, but our brains have learned to block it out through something called unconscious selective attention. That way it isn't constantly distracting us. Good luck on forgetting that soon and going back to not seeing your own nose. :)
I see (notice) my nose all the time. I guess my brain is broken.
Load More Replies... I guess Pantone has some work to do with #d0417e then. Next they’ll be telling me that Octarine isn’t a real color either. 🧙🏻♂️
Pantone is an industry principle with the sillo requirement of printing ink on a surface with a consistent result. Pantone colors are only ink tha are pre mixed together based on mixing 10 different colors instead of of the four-color mix (CMYK) which is also an industry principle based on material color mixing(ink) as opposed to light color mixing(like a screen). RGB is used to describe the color emitted by a source of light.
Load More Replies... So if everyone's brains are just interpreting what the color yellow is supposed to be, then does everyone actually see a different color that everyone else? My brain makes it slightly more of one shade than someone else's? Does that make sense?
Remember the "dress" fiasco? Yeah, we interpret light bouncing off stuff differently depending on the way the rods and cones in our eye are arranged.
Load More Replies... The first time I looked at something that was covered in Vantablack, I was convinced I'd never see anything ever again. Seriously. If finding out magenta isn't a real colour freaked you out, go look at Vantablack. That s**t will swallow your soul.
Or black3.0. At least, if you're not Anish Kapoor
Load More Replies... This is off topic, but does anyone miss when people used to spell out words (or at least try) in their entirety? Reading the first sentence of this post and I'm already lost. Oh well, it is what it is I supposed. Anyway, I like magenta.
I refuse to use the abbreviations (not online, not in emails, not in text messages, not anywhere) out of principle.
Load More Replies... I think it's a "real colour" in the conventional, non-scientific understanding of colour. Like, if you can make a pigment of it, it's a colour.
I am a woman with a colorblind dad and passed on his gene to both of my sons. There is some experimenting that women carrying this gene may actually have a 4th cone??? We've been experimenting .......how we perceive color. I am an artist and color has always been my forte. I believe I could mix up what is known as magenta with a pallet of paint. It's interesting. As long as they can at least stop or go at the stoplights and such, I don't worry all that much, I do feel bad that they can't see colors the way I do, and god love em' they do try to guilt me about the gene thing..cest"la vie ....the rest is kind of a matter of perception. ;-)
Look, if magenta isn't a color because it's not on the rainbow (i.e. doesn't have a specific wavelength), then white, pink, brown, beige, cyan, and black aren't colors either. The purpose of language is to communicate with other people, so why would you insist on this weird definition of a word that 99.99% of English speakers would disagree with?? Sometimes a specific technical field has a more precise meaning of the word than the casual usage of the word, but that doesn't seem to be the case here, since nobody has identified that field.
I thought black was a lack of color & white was all colors.
Load More Replies... It's a bit click baity and exaggerated to call it fake. Firstly, a color can certainly be a mix. Secondly, although seeing a color is a first person experience, it is anchored to some objective reality, which in this case is the stated mixture of red and violet. The fact that we can talk about it at all proves it is very "real."
The point is that magenta is not a mix. It has no wavelength. Most colors we see are indeed mixes, averages of multiple wavelengths, like the yellow example given in the article, but magenta is not.
Load More Replies... But by the same token, black isn't a color either, because that's not on the rainbow.
Load More Replies... But what about additive light colors? Ie when you combine magenta and green, you get white light. ? Magenta is the opposite of green in additive color. That's what we were taught in my physics and optics of photography class.
Photography and this dont correlate. A light prism and the rainbow doesnt give 2 shits about additive colors.
Load More Replies... The ancient Greeks did not have a word for, or concept of, what we call blue. Pink is another color that doesn't exist on the spectrum and the color is named for the flowers which have an uneven or 'pinked' edge. And originally it was the color for boys. Blue was for girls. The fruit came before the color orange. The sun is actually white. And pencils are yellow because that was the royal color in China where the best graphite was produced.
There are three primary colors on the color wheel: red, yellow, and blue. When you mix these colors you get the secondary colors: red + yellow = orange ( more red in the mix = red - orange), yellow + blue = green ( again it can be yellowish green or blue- green), blue + red = purple (violet) hue when there is more blue than red in the mix; and when there's more red then blue you get red-violet or magenta, or fuchsia. And all kinds of other hues when you mix primary colors with secondary colors, or two (or more) secondary colors together, the sky is the limit. Then there are neutral colors: white, grey, beige, brown, and black. That's in interior design, fashion. Was wad discussed in this post were colors in photography.
I am what you call a Master Printer. <- Back when you had actual film and negatives. This is (excluding the cursing), the best explanation of colour theory I have read in years. BRAVO!
Magenta, just like Cyan is part of the additive CMYK colour separation (adding to Black). Not to be mistaken with the negative system used on TV (adding to White). This article is wasting a lot of time denying colours such as Chartreuse, etc,.... Where do we stop! Those colours can all be perceived and used. What a load of bull.
What!? All this time there are really no Magenta or Stygian Blue? What next my neighbors are not really there? :-(
So, if it doesn't exist, and our brains are just making it up - how do we know we all "see" the same "colour" when we look at one of these fake colours? My brain might perceive magenta, but the other guy perceives yellow. How would we ever know? PS - This thought has bugged me since I was little. Good to know there is actually some science behind it.
I didn't realize that everyone sees colors differently (aside from color blindness) until a few years ago and I'm 56. One of my twins was standing next to me and I said something about the yarn I was crocheting with. He saw it as pink and I saw it as orange. His twin agreed it was pink so we called in their older brother who saw orange like me. We then turned to my purse which I saw as brown and they saw as gray. It's rather eye opening to realize we are all moving through the world seeing things very differently.
i am not afraid to say i have spent 10 minutes googling this and texting my friends, "did you know". half of them say shut up and 'if you can't see it, who named it? a blind man? and i have nothing....
Cats can't see reds/pinks too well. Dogs see the spectrum as brown-gray-blue. Birds can see ultraviolet. I think the perception of magenta is really not worth any existential angst... Especially on a Monday!
It's like that statement that a mirror doesn't reflect anything when nobody is looking. Or a falling tree making no sound when nobody is around to hear it. I think everything we see or hear is what our brain interprets for us, and is only a fraction of a much larger picture anyway.
But those statements are wrong. A mirror does reflect light even when nobody is looking at it. And a falling tree does generate a compression wave that propagates through air, even when nobody is around to detect that wave.
Load More Replies... I work in print and we only use colors. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black. And if you want to get technical Black isn't a color.
Next, let's talk about the other fact that brown doesn't exist either!
This must be what they mean when they say that a person dyed their hair a color not found in nature.
Red, Blue an YELLOW are Primary colors so yes Yellow does exist, yellow and blue make orange. But that is in color theory (an artist would know what that is). Whoever wrote this article is an idiot who likes to use F * CK way to much.
The article states that yellow exists, it's simply that our eyes don't have rods to perceive it, so our brains have to make up what it looks like.
Load More Replies... The reason people are freaking out is because they are mixing "color" with "pigment". "Color" is what you see in a rainbow or a prism. If you cant see it there, it is not a "color"... colors only exist when you can mix with another color right next to it on the spectrum. Thats why you cant mix Purple with red... they are on opposite ends. "Pigments" are what you get when you mix colors that are not next to each other. So is magenta a color? NO. But it is certainly a pigment. There are lots of "pigments" that are not colors. Its like that high school riddle. All colors are also pigments, but not all pigments are colors.
That's ridiculous. Color is a combination of wavelengths. It doesn't have to be on the rainbow (i.e. a specific wavelength). Black is a color. White is a color. Pink is a color. Beige is a color. (And I *am* a physicist.)
Load More Replies... I learned a bit of this when I researched purple. Purple is my favorite color, yet it is rarely seen in nature. We see violet in nature, which to me looks kinda like another shade of blue. So I couldn't help but wonder, does real purple even exist? So I googled if it's real and turns out, not really. The rainbow doesn't even have any true purple. Purple is just what our brain interprets red + blue as. It doesn't have it's own separate light wavelength, which makes it a fake color
Are you saying black and white are false colors? Because those don't have specific wavelengths.
Load More Replies... They keep talking about mixing red and violet. Violet is purple (to people under the age of 80). I was taught in kindergarden that purple was red and blue mixed together. So, magent is red and red and blue mixed together? As far as perceiving it, to me it looks like light purple. It's just a shade of purple. I've never gone in for describing every tiny difference in shade of a color by a different name. (Not good at it) There are 6 colors to my eye: Yellow, blue, red, green, orange, purple.
But this was very interesting! I love these types of posts on BP.
Load More Replies... And y'all ppl fight over what clothes look good on u in which colour. Really u ppl just need. To take a nap. Much better than fashion show and what not It's really funny ppl giving so much importance to things, that is just literally the guesswork of ur brain. And ur brain says f**k it, it's not important. Gods looking at girls fighting In a sale makes me worried about the evolution of the species.
Colours are damn fun, and there are combinations that look better than others.
Load More Replies... It doesn't really matter, generally, it's just fascinating to learn these things.
Load More Replies... That's not at all the whole story summed up. It's like you skimmed this post or something.
Load More Replies... The "friend" on the end of that really doesn't do you any favours
Load More Replies...
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