Purple, not to be confused with violet, is actually a large range of colors represented by the different hues created when red, blue, or violet light mix. Purple is a color mixture, whereas violet is a spectral color, meaning it consists of a single wavelength of light.
Scientifically, purple is not a color because there is no beam of pure light that looks purple. There is no light wavelength that corresponds to purple. We see purple because the human eye can't tell what's really going on.
An exotic colour at the far end of our visible spectrum and often associated with royalty, purple is relatively rare in nature. But some vibrant plants, animals and fungi do show off a regal purple, using it to warn predators, attract pollinators and protect themselves from the Sun.
The human eye can see a range of colours between ultraviolet and infrared. We see violet when light comes into our eyes and triggers blue with a hint of red. On the flip side, purple doesn't exist anywhere along the light spectrum, so it isn't a “spectral” colour.
Facts About the Color Purple
William Henry Perkin accidentally created mauve — and the world's first synthetic dye — during a failed chemistry experiment.
In fact, Queen Elizabeth I forbad anyone except close members of the royal family to wear it. Purple's elite status stems from the rarity and cost of the dye originally used to produce it. Purple fabric used to be so outrageously expensive that only rulers could afford it.
Tyrian purple dye was first manufactured by the Phoenicians in the 16th century BCE. According to the legend recorded by the Greek scholar Julius Pollux in the 2nd century CE, the dye was discovered by the Phoenician god Melqart while walking along the seashore with his dog and the nymph Tyros.
However, there are other “colours” that our eyes can't see, beyond red and violet, they are: infrared and ultraviolet.
The visible spectrum for humans falls between ultraviolet light and red light. Scientists estimate that humans can distinguish up to 10 million colors.
What we really need to know is that our eyes, in all their complexity, can only interpret a limited range of light. So, that means that there are colours that we can't see due to a phenomenon known as the opponent process. These are known as “forbidden” or “impossible” colours.
The color blue that is found in foods, plants, and animals lacks a chemical compound that makes them blue, which makes the natural blue pigment so rare.
To make the first purple shades, dye-makers had to crush the shells of a species of sea snail, extract its purple mucus and then expose it to the sun for a specific period. The process made the colour so scarce and expensive that wearing it was a symbol of status and wealth.
No color has arguably done so more than the color purple. Specifically, Tyrian purple, the production of which was a closely guarded secret for millennia, making the dye the rarest and most expensive color in history.
False color is a feature on monitors that can read exposure levels in a given shot. It is primarily known for displaying images in a different color scheme to make certain details more noticeable. Images displayed with these colors follow a spectrum that includes purple, blue, black, grey, yellow, orange, and red.
And since light being reflected by objects is what gives them a color, some think this means that the color pink doesn't really exist. In reality pink is an illusion created by our brains mixing red and purple light — so while we see the color pink, it doesn't have a wavelength.
Light consists of electromagnetic waves, and colour depends on the wavelength. If colours were simply a naming scheme for wavelengths then pink is not one, because it is made up of more than one wavelength (it's actually a mix of red and purple light).
About 8% to 10% of the male population is colorblind. Colorblindness is most present in males due to the way genetics work (see footnotes). Only an estimated 0.5% of the female population is colorblind. Tritan-type colorblindness is not gender specific, women and men are equally affected.
Despite the extraordinary experience of color perception, all colors are mere illusions, in the sense that, although naive people normally think that objects appear colored because they are colored, this belief is mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are colored, but colors are the result of neural processes.
As mentioned previously, cones are composed of three different photo pigments that enable color perception. This curve peaks at 555 nanometers, which means that under normal lighting conditions, the eye is most sensitive to a yellowish-green color.
That's because, even though those colors exist, you've probably never seen them. Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called "forbidden colors." Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they're supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously.
purple, a shade varying between crimson and violet. Formerly, it was the deep crimson colour called in Latin purpura, from the name of the shellfish Purpura, which yielded the famous Tyrian dye.
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker has been banned in schools all over the country since 1984, due to its graphic sexual content and situations of violence and abuse. While “The Color Purple” contains a lot of controversial content, it's necessary to the story and is what makes the book so real and unique.
The word “purple” comes from the Old English word “purpul,” which is from the Latin “purpura” and from the ancient Greek “porphyra.” This was the name of the Tyrian purple dye manufactured in classical antiquity.