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.
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.
Tyrian Purple was the original 'forbidden color'. It was so difficult to produce this dye – 12,000 sea snails were required to color one garment – that royalty would execute anyone else daring to wear it. It wasn't until the late 1800's that chemistry made a cost-effective purple dye a reality.
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). If you took a laser and tuned it across the visible wavelengths, from infrared through to ultraviolet, you would not pass pink on the way.
Purple is common in plants, largely thanks to a group of chemicals called anthocyanins. When it comes to animals, however, purple is more difficult to produce. Mammals are unable to create pigments for purple, blue or green. Birds and insects are only able to display purple through structural colouration.
The royal class' purple monopoly finally waned after the fall of the Byzantine empire in the 15th century, but the color didn't become more widely available until the 1850s, when the first synthetic dyes hit the market.
The most refracted colour when light passes through a prism, purple is at the far end of the visible colour spectrum, and is the hardest colour for the eye to discriminate.
Blue is one of the rarest of colors in nature. Even the few animals and plants that appear blue don't actually contain the color. These vibrant blue organisms have developed some unique features that use the physics of light.
Perhaps the most famous of the deadly colors is white lead, which can still be found in houses across the country. Lead paint was desirable for centuries due to its brilliant white color, but the adverse effects of lead poisoning only became known in the last century.
Purple in the Elizabethan era (1558–1603), under Sumptuary law, enforced by Queen Elizabeth I, purple fabrics are forbidden for all the classes of people except the royal family.
Challenged in Fairfax (VA) school libraries by a group called Parents Against Bad Books in Schools for “profanity and descriptions of drug abuse, sexually explicit conduct and torture”.
The Color Purple was removed in Summerville, South Carolina in 2001 after a school board member called it “a filthy, filthy book.” It's been called “vulgar.” It's been called “immoral.” But, yes, books are mirrors, and Oscar Wilde was on to something when he said that the books that the world calls immoral are the ...
Some consider white to be a color, because white light comprises all hues on the visible light spectrum. And many do consider black to be a color, because you combine other pigments to create it on paper. But in a technical sense, black and white are not colors, they're shades. They augment colors.
Purple is rare in nature because compounds that absorb in the requisite range of electromagnetic spectrum are extremely rare and difficult to produce biologically.
The NCS color model is based on the three pairs of elementary colors (white–black, green–red, and yellow–blue), as defined by color opponency.
Because the colors of light travel at different speeds, they get bent by different amounts and come out all spread out instead of mixed up. Violet travels the slowest so it is on the bottom and red travels the fastest so is on the top.
One reason is that true blue colours or pigments simply don't exist in nature, and plants and animals have to perform tricks to appear blue, according to the University of Adelaide. Take blue jays for example, which only appear blue due to the structure of their feathers, which distort the reflection of light.
In old catalogs and books, pink was the color for little boys, said Leatrice Eiseman, a color expert and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. “It was related to the mother color of red, which was ardent and passionate and more active, more aggressive.
The real reason was that for thousands of years purple dye was far too expensive. It was possible the most expensive product available being worth more than gold, jewels, castles, ships, silk, spices, and silver.
There are 196 countries in the world today and virtually none of them have purple on their national flag. So what's wrong with purple?
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. The limitation results from the way we perceive color in the first place.
Colour is not a physical property of an object - it is a sensation, just like smell or taste. Colour is generated only when light of a particular wavelength falls onto the retina of the eye and specialized sensory cells generate a nerve impulse, which is routed to the brain where it is perceived as being colour.
Colors like white and pink are not present in the spectrum because they are the result of our eyes' mixing wavelengths of light.
The brain is a pinkish, grayish color, and that's thanks to the parts that compose it. Most of the brain is made of cells called grey matter that are, in fact, gray.
Yellow is the least favorite color, preferred by only five percent of people. Another interesting survey finding: both men and women increasingly dislike orange as they age!