COLOURS. An indispensible part of human life and society. One of the main pillars of variety in our lives is formed by the different hues and shades of different objects around us. Without them our lives would dull and boring like a black and white television(well, they are also considered colours).Of all the different colours and hues and shades, two colours have been associated, regularly and stereotypically, with the two prevailing genders of our society-BLUE for BOYS and PINK for GIRLS. The later colour is very well known and is regularly used in toys for girls. Colours and their uses have seeped so deep into our society that to say a colour, as famous and widely used as pink, doesn’t exist will be treated almost like blasphemy. But again, one of our most notable Scientist of the 21st century, Dr. Stephen Hawking was an atheist. So let’s try to decode the mystery behind the colour pink and what led me into writing this weird article
In our younger days we were taught the VIBGYOR acronym to remember all the hues of the rainbow. And as we grew up we came to learn that each of the different colours in the rainbow correspond to different wavelength of visible light.
So each colour has its own wavelength and its own unique place in the VIBGYOR acronym. Here is where the real question arises, ‘Where on earth is pink on that list?’ One might think that like cyan and other colours, pink might be formed by mixing two colours and hence the absence from the main list. Well, it would be the right thing to think , however there would be a tiny problem. The colour Pink is formed by mixing red and blue and these two colours lie on the opposite ends of the spectrum of visible light. If we roll the spectrum into a circle, the colour pink should lie between the colours ,blue and white, but then again all other forms of radiation lies in that particular area .Therefore one can say that pink doesn’t exist. And although pink can be formed by mixing other colours, it has no individual place and is nearly impossible to locate it within the visible light spectrum. Now that we have committed a blasphemous act against the whole Barbie community, it’s time for another curious question ‘How on earth can we see pink?’ To understand that we have to dive deeper into the sea of knowledge.
How exactly does one see colours? What causes the sensation in our eyes? Well, much like most other things it is a two way process.
When white light or light from the sun shines on an object most of the colours of different wavelength are absorbed and a colour of a specific wavelength. Consider the example of an apple, the apple absorbs all of the white light falling on the apple, except for the colour red, which is then reflected off the surface of the apple. White coloured objects absorb all of the light and black coloured objects reflect all of the light.
The Light rays reflected from an object travels to our eyes, from where it is transmitted to our brain. This process is a very complicated one. At the back of our eyes are millions of tiny structures shaped like cones and rods which transmit light to the brain. The number of the rods exceed the number of cones. The rods only work in low-light and the cones fire up only in a bright environment. It’s the cones that are responsible(to a large extent) for the way we see the colourful world.
The cones detect three primary colours: Red, Green and Blue. The cones light up and detect the different colours. The primary colour are a bit easier to detect then the other colours as they require only a single type of cone to light up. But as soon as a secondary or a tertiary hits up the retina, things get a little tricky. The complications arise as it takes two different types of cones to detect a non-primary colour. To ease things up a little bit, let’s consider a cyan coloured object. Since there are no cones to detect the colour yellow, the red cones and the green cones work together and send signals to the brain which then perceives the object as yellow.
Some colours require more than to colours to get detected. Black and White for example require all three cones to fire up. White requires all the cones to fire up while black requires none. Pink on the other hand requires the red cone to fires up fully and the other two cones to fire up partially, which is then perceived by our brain as the colour pink.
The chances that pink exists or doesn’t exist are as the same as the chances that God exists or doesn’t exist. Although the colour pink does not exist on the visible spectrum, yet it has made its mark our culture and even though it is perceived by our brain as a colour it does not possess a specific wavelength. To conclude, we are not able to surely say that pink doesn’t exist since a lot of factors are involved in the way we see things..