One of our Colors is Missing: Why Purple Doesn't Exist, and How we can Still See It

Contrary to popular belief, the color purple isn’t real.

Well, that’s not quite true:  Some people consider violet(which DOES exist) to be a shade of purple.  To me, it’s more of a blue, but let’s not get lost in semantics-- The point is that most of what you think of as purple is a lie.

Wait, What?

Let me explain.  Unless you’ve studied lightwaves or color theory, you probably think of the range of colors as a wheel, like this:

That, however, is wrong(but still useful).  Color is not a wheel, but a line.  The most accurate depiction of light(as science sees it) is something more like this:

But wait a moment.  Where’s purple?  Yep, that’s right;  There is no wavelength of light that corresponds to most of what we call purple.

You See?

So if it doesn’t exist, how do we see it?  To understand that, we need to know how we see color in general.

You can spend a lifetime studying the science of the eye, but the quick and dirty version is this;  Our eyes have three kinds of ‘cones,’ red cones, green cones, and blue cones, each responsible for finding a different color.  When you look at something, these cones will send a message to your brain if they see something their color.

So when you see something blue, your blue cones light up, and when you see something red, your red cones light up.  The rest of the colors are the result of two or more kinds of cones lighting up at once.  Thus, when you see something yellow, your green and red cones fire at the same time, because yellow is between the two.

So here’s where it gets tricky:  What do you get when red and blue cones fire at the same time, but your green ones don’t?  Nothing.  There’s nothing between beginning and end but the middle.  You can’t have a number between one and three that isn’t two.

So What Does This Mean?

Because there’s nothing between red and blue that doesn’t involve green, your brain has to make something up so you can process the information.  The result is the color purple, along with all its buddies like magenta.

What implications does this have?  Well…  Not too many.  This discovery has left the fields of graphic design, art, color theory, and even most of science completely unchanged.

What I find fascinating, though, is the symbolism we as a culture have attached to this imaginary color.  Most of you know that it signifies royalty, but it also represents spirituality, creativity, imagination, peace, mystery, and magic in color psychology.

In some cultures, it also represents the spiritual realm.  For example, in Thai culture, widows wear purple to morn their husbands.  In Hindu culture, the seventh Chakra is associated with the color purple.

More familiar to myself, purple signifies the coming of Jesus in the season of Advent, and His return in the season of Lent.

Almost universally, the nonexistent color of purple has been used to represent ‘something beyond’ in one way or another.  I don’t really know what it means, but I do find it very interesting.

Purple Reigns

Well, that’s all I have for today.  I know this has been a very different article from what I usually write, but I find the topic fascinating enough that I had to share it.  So what do you guys think?  Any thoughts on the nonexistence of purple?  Do you have another cool tidbit of color theory to share?  Or an observation about the significance of this one?  Feel free to comment, don’t forget to subscribe or follow, and, as always, keep on geekin’ on!