You’re probably sitting in a room right now surrounded by what you’d call "color." Maybe there’s a red mug on your desk or a faded blue poster on the wall. But here is the thing: those objects aren't actually those colors. They're just reflecting specific wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Your brain does the rest. It's a hallucination, basically. A very useful, very consistent hallucination that helps us not get eaten by predators or trip over the coffee table. When we talk about all of the colors in the world, we aren't just talking about a box of Crayola crayons. We are talking about the visible spectrum, physics, biology, and the weird way our language actually changes what we see.
The world is messier than a rainbow.
Most people think of the rainbow—ROYGBIV—as the definitive list. Thank Isaac Newton for that. He was obsessed with the number seven because of its religious and musical significance, so he squeezed "indigo" in there just to make the count right. In reality, the spectrum is a continuous gradient. There aren't lines between the colors. It’s an infinite smear of light.
The Physics of Everything You See
Light is a wave. Or a particle. It's both, but for color, let's stick with waves. The "visible spectrum" for humans sits between roughly 380 and 700 nanometers. If the wavelength is long, you see red. If it’s short, you see violet. Anything outside that tiny window? Total darkness to us. Infrared is right there, just past the red, warming your skin. Ultraviolet is just past the violet, giving you a sunburn. We are literally blind to most of all of the colors in the world because our eyes just aren't built to catch them.
Bees see ultraviolet. To them, a plain yellow flower has a "bullseye" pattern leading to the nectar that we can't see without a lab setup. Reindeer see UV to spot lichen in the snow. We’re the ones missing out.
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Inside your eye, you’ve got these cells called cones. Most of us have three types: red, green, and blue. This makes us "trichromats." When light hits your eye, these cones fire off signals to the brain, which mixes them like a painter on a palette. If you’re looking at a yellow lemon, your red and green cones are both firing, and your brain goes, "Okay, that's yellow." It’s a biological calculation happening in milliseconds.
Some people, mostly women, are actually "tetrachromats." They have a fourth cone. To them, a gravel path isn't just gray; it's a shimmering mosaic of subtle pinks, greens, and golds that the rest of us literally cannot perceive. They are seeing a version of all of the colors in the world that is objectively deeper than the average human experience.
Why Some Colors Don't Exist (But We See Them Anyway)
Pink is a lie.
Seriously. If you look at a spectrum of light, pink—or more accurately, magenta—isn't there. There is no single wavelength of "pink" light. It only exists because our brains don't know what to do when both our red and blue cones are stimulated at the same time without any green in the middle. The brain hates a vacuum. Instead of seeing a weird green-ghost-hole, it invents magenta. It’s a bridge between the two ends of the rainbow that doesn't actually exist in the physical world.
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Then there’s "Vantablack." Or the newer versions like Musou Black. These aren't just dark paints. They are structures of carbon nanotubes that trap 99.9% of light. When you look at it, your brain gets confused. It looks like a hole in the universe. It’s the absence of all of the colors in the world. It’s the closest you can get to looking at a black hole on your kitchen table.
The Language of Color: Do You See What I See?
This is where it gets really trippy. There is a famous study regarding the Himba people of Namibia. In their language, they don't have a separate word for "blue" and "green." They use the same word for both. When researchers showed them a circle of green squares with one clearly blue square, many of them couldn't pick out the outlier easily. However, they have many different words for different shades of green that look identical to Westerners. Because their language differentiates those greens, their brains are "tuned" to see those differences instantly.
The ancient Greeks didn't really have a word for blue either. Homer famously described the sea as "wine-dark." It wasn't that the Mediterranean was literally the color of Merlot; they just categorized colors differently, focusing more on "lightness" and "darkness" or "texture" than the specific hue.
The way we categorize all of the colors in the world is largely a cultural construct. We think "Orange" is a primary thing, but until the fruit was brought to Europe, people just called it "yellow-red." The color was named after the fruit, not the other way around.
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The Chemistry of Pigment and the Price of Blue
Historically, having access to all of the colors in the world was a sign of immense wealth. You couldn't just go to a hardware store and buy a gallon of "Royal Blue."
- Ultramarine: This was the most expensive pigment in the Renaissance. It was made by grinding up Lapis Lazuli, a semi-precious stone from Afghanistan. It cost more than gold. This is why the Virgin Mary is almost always wearing blue in old paintings—it was a flex by the person who commissioned the art.
- Tyrian Purple: This came from the mucus of sea snails. Thousands of snails had to be crushed to dye a single robe. It smelled terrible. Like, rotting fish terrible. But if you wore it, everyone knew you were royalty because nobody else could afford to smell that bad and look that good.
- Mummy Brown: This is gruesome but true. In the 16th and 17th centuries, painters used a pigment actually made from ground-up Egyptian mummies. It was a rich, transparent brown. They stopped making it once people realized, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't be painting with dead people."
Today, we have synthetic pigments. We have hex codes. We have #FF5733. We’ve democratized color, but in doing so, we’ve lost some of the texture and history behind how these shades were "captured" from nature.
How to Actually Use This Information
Knowing about all of the colors in the world isn't just trivia. It’s a tool for how you interact with your environment. Color affects your biology.
Blue light—the high-energy stuff from your phone and the sun—suppresses melatonin. It tells your brain it’s daytime. That’s why you can’t sleep after scrolling TikTok for three hours. Red light has the opposite effect; it doesn't disrupt your circadian rhythm nearly as much. This is why submarines and cockpits use red lighting at night.
If you want to paint a room to feel "calm," don't just pick a random blue. Look at the light. A north-facing room gets "cool" light, which can make a crisp blue look like a hospital morgue. You need a blue with warm undertones to balance it out.
Actionable Steps for Mastering Color in Your Life
- Check your light bulbs: Stop buying "Cool White" bulbs for your living room. They have a high Kelvin rating (5000K+) that mimics an office or a grocery store. It makes colors look flat and clinical. Aim for "Warm White" (2700K-3000K) for spaces where you want to relax.
- Test paint in "The Four Corners": Never buy paint based on a tiny swatch in the store. Buy a sample. Paint a large square on every wall of the room. Look at it at 8:00 AM, noon, and 8:00 PM. The shifting sun changes the wavelengths hitting the wall, and that "perfect gray" will look purple by sunset.
- Understand Contrast: If you’re designing something—a website, a presentation, or an outfit—don't just look at the hues. Squint your eyes until everything goes blurry. If the elements disappear into each other, you don't have enough value contrast (the difference between light and dark). This is more important for readability than the actual colors you choose.
- Calibrate your screens: If you work in any creative field, your monitor is lying to you. Every screen has a different "tint." Use a calibration tool if you want to see the true version of all of the colors in the world as they were meant to be displayed.
The world is a vibrating mess of energy. We just happen to have sensors in our heads that turn that energy into a "red" sunset or a "green" forest. Understanding the gap between the physics of light and the biology of the eye doesn't make the world less beautiful. It makes it more incredible. You aren't just seeing the world; you are actively creating the color of it every time you open your eyes.