Wednesday, October 19, 2011

The Color Pink Is All In Your Head!

Today I learned something amazing about the color on all those Barbie boxes.

From a technical, science perspective, the color you see in the background of this blog doesn't really exist. It's just something our brains make up. All the colors in the spectrum have their own specific wavelengths of light, except for pink! So then how is it that we see pink at all, let alone so many shades of it?

It's due to a sort of "blank space" in the light/color spectrum. Red has the longest wavelength, violet the shortest, while all the other colors inbetween have wavelengths of varying degrees somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Yet, between  red and violet themselves, there is a blank canvas space, so to speak, where anything goes. In this space, there are all types of light in the universe, but we can't see them, so our brains create pink to compensate for that! Pink is actually white light without the green wavelengths. Even though it's science, it sounds rather magical when you think about it. Doesn't it make you wonder what other colors we might be missing, that we can't even fathom? I do.

Here's the link to the original article I read this from, on a site called "Life's Little Mysteries". It's a favourite of mine, filled with all kinds of weird, interesting stuff like this.  http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/no-pink-light-strange-snapshots-2101/

1 comment:

  1. God, that is so weird! But kind of awesome, too. Anyhow, I love this blog.

    I read in your profile that you like hamsters, so if you'd like, my hamster blog link is below.

    http://inkythehamstermommy.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete