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The Color Pink is a Lie
Your Brain Made It Up — and You Fell for It
“Is the author on drugs? There’s literally pink in the thumbnail of this article!”, you might be thinking. “Perhaps even the pills he took were pink…”
Hear me out for a second! Clearly, you and I are both able to see pink in the image above. I’m also not just claiming that pink isn’t real because I can’t distinguish it from purple or magenta (though that is probably true as well), or that it doesn’t occur in nature. What I’m talking about is something much weirder.
You see pink all the time — on flowers, on flamingos, in neon signs, and birthday cards. It’s everywhere you look… until you actually look for it. But I don’t mean on a painted wall or a bright computer screen.
Rather, the problem occurs when we split light into its most basic ingredients, the way a chef might analyze the spices in a well-cooked dish. It is at that moment that things get weird, because pink is absolutely nowhere to be found.
I first started suspecting something was off about pink when I took a longer look at a rainbow. Rainbows are one of the best places to see the full spectrum of colors nature has to offer (closely followed by a certain Pink Floyd album cover, if you are a rock fan). For example, just view the rainbow below:
