Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. HOMEPAGE

Pink light doesn't really exist

Australia pink lake
Shutterstock/vvvita

We all think that the visible spectrum of light — every color we can see — is represented in the rainbow. But this isn't actually true.

Advertisement

When you hold up a crystal prism to a beam of light, you see red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet and every color in between coming out the other side. But where does pink fall?

Colors look different to our eyes because they have different wavelengths — ranging from 400 nanometers from purple to 700 nanometers for dark red:

Electromagnetic spectrum
The electromagnetic spectrum. The thin part in the middle is the range of wavelengths our eyes perceive as color. Johannes Ahlmann/Flickr

Most colors that our brain sees are associated with specific wavelengths that fall in these numbers. All shades of green fall between blue and yellow in the spectrum and therefore have wavelengths that fall between those of blue and yellow.

But if you look closely, you'll see that pink isn't anywhere in there. There's no specific wavelength of light that looks pink.

Advertisement

That's because, according to this super-short explanation from Minute Physics, there's actually no such thing as pink light.

When we see the color pink, otherwise known as fuchsia or magenta, what we are actually seeing is a mix of red, blue, and purple light — light colors that don't intersect in a rainbow so there's no intermediate wavelength that is "pink."

The minute physics video shows this by rolling up the electromagnetic spectrum into a kind of color wheel, connecting one end to the other, showing that pink would theoretically fall in the gap between red and purple.

Minute Physics's explanation is that that gap contains all the wavelengths you can't see — radio waves, microwaves, infrared, X-rays, and gamma rays.

Advertisement

And because we can't see any of those wavelengths, our vision instead invents pink to fill the gap.

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.

But of course, pink lovers argue that Minute Physics' description oversimplifies the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

According to Scientific American, and in reality, it would be impossible to roll up and connect one end of the electromagnetic spectrum to the other, because it "extends from a wavelength of zero meters all the way up to infinity."

Advertisement

But because of how our eyes and minds work, there does seem to be a gap in the rainbow, which our brains fill in as pink when they see a combination of purple and red.

On a certain level, all of the colors in the rainbow are imaginary "sensations that arise within the brain" and not "a property of light or of objects that reflect light," according to Scientific American.

From that perspective, pink is in some sense imaginary, but then so are all the other colors that make up the rainbow.

Watch the whole Minute Physics video below.

Physics
Advertisement
Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification.

Jump to

  1. Main content
  2. Search
  3. Account