/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>19085632
Interestingly, purple does not exist as a color. I mean, it does not have a corresponding wavelength in the color spectrum and thus it is not show in a rainbow. No, what you see in a rainbow is violet, just after blue, not purple. Purple is the mix of red and blue, two colors in the opposite parts of the spectrum, with a result that is not a color by itself. It is just your brain “inventing” a new color so you can tell that the object is reflecting both red and blue wavelengths. This new color is similar to violet but not quite the same.

Although violet is quite common in nature, true purple is almost impossible to find naturally (the only source known comes from certain snails), which is why it was the color used exclusively by the royalty and the emperors of the past. Dyeing a single cape of purple involved hundreds of people fishing and crushing tons and tons of snails over several months.

Also, your monitor can easily display purple, as it has leds of pure red and blue, but it can’t represent violet because it cannot release the extremely short wavelengths required. So every time you see violet in your computer it is actually purple, and every time you thought you saw purple in nature it was actually violet.