What color even is magenta? Is it a shade of pink? Purple? Red? It is quite literally none of these and does not technically exist in the natural world. The visible light spectrum makes up the colors that we can see and runs from purple to red, with shades of blue, green, yellow, and orange between them. But what is between the purple and red going the other way? All visible light has a specific wavelength that allows our eyes to see it as a certain color. Since magenta does not technically exist on the color wheel, it does not have one of these wavelengths that our eyes can easily recognize.
Usually, our brain will try to average the two colors it is seeing to give you the resulting color. For instance, red and green light will average out to be yellow. However, if we are using the visible light spectrum, the average color between purple and red is green, but that doesn’t logically make sense. So instead, our mind fills the gap between the purple and red in the most logical way, fading the two colors together, to give us magenta. So magenta might not be “real”, but in all actuality, are any colors real?
