Thursday, October 20, 2011
There's No Such Thing as the Color Pink
Gizmodo: Want to have your brain blown for a few minutes today? Dip your head in some physics, and realize that there's no such thing as pink. Scientifically speaking, that is: it's just something our brain makes up.
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10 comments:
whaaaaaaaaaat?
This is fascinating. I've been exposed to the color rainbow for a long time and I never realized that pink wasn't there. I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around this concept. I thought it was humorous, the new proposed name for pink: Minus Green. I think I may start calling it that but I imagine I will get a lot of weird looks from everyone I encounter when referring to Pink as Minus green.
I thought pink technically belonged to the red family...isn't that what we learned in grade school when we mixed our red and white tempera paints together? It's the red equivalent of light blue, or light-any-other-color, we just named it "pink." Guess my grade school color theory is a bust, because now that we have learned to mix for real with Beth, it turns out there's a lot of blue in pink, which makes sense in conjunction with this video. still hard to think of pink as something made up, since those early genetic studies of flowers definitely cited pink ones (true hybrids) vs. the ones that were just red and white dots (dihybrid, I think)...oh well. I still love pink, even if it's just the absence of my favorite color, green.
The world would give women a make-believe color. Bastards.
I feel that the video/article just explained to be how pink does exist in terms of light. Clearly there is the color pink, and it exists, because we all see it. The title of this article is a little out of place. It seems that what they are really saying is that the way in which pink light is created is different from other color lights because it is not on the roygbiv spectrum. Saying that there's no such thing as pink is just incorrect and is not supported by the information provided.
Are they saying Pink is not a color? Or not a color in the rainbow? Because I would agree that there is no wavelength level for Pink. But there also isn't one for Brown. So is Brown "not a color"? The reason you can find Aquamarine in a rainbow spectrum is because theres a certain place for it in-between blue and green. They must be arguing that theres no place between Red and Blue that you would find Pink. But I think if you found a sliver of red on the very end of the spectrum, where Red meets White, you'd find Pink. Although, I supposed White isn't on the color spectrum.
Everyone so far brings up a great point. Is pink a color in the "Red Family", or a mixture of two colors? But isn't every color that is not primary a mixture of two colors? And paint nowadays is already not necessarily just a primary pigment that we can add white to get the color we want...In terms of pink not being a color I feel that they are talking specifically about the rainbow and the spectrum. Calling pink "Minus Green" reminds me of gel. There must be some reason why we want to have a gel that has minus green as its function. Its all about color, and how we correct what we perceive as color and in color.
This is hilarious! I also think that the method of communication of the information is very effective. It has just the right amount of attitude while still explaining a concept.
However... arguing about whether or not something is a color... Not very useful. It obviously is a color that we are able to reproduce both in light and pigment, so it is obviously part of the spectrum.
As far as articles go, this one was brain candy. It was interesting and presented humorously, and it would be something that I probably wouldn’t care much about, except for the fact that I have to write about it. This being said, I put some thought into this and realized just how many “pink” things there are around us. Which led me to replacing these names with the alternative that the article suggests, minus green. So would the pop singer be called Minus Green? The 80’s hit movie would be called “Pretty in Minus Green”? Baby girls would be dressed in minus green? Roses would be Minus Greens? “Honey, I bought you a bouquet of Minus Green Roses!” – does not sound so romantic. As interesting as this article is, I think we should let this fact be one of those things that you know is there, but don’t really care about.
minus green forever!
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