Colour pink is merely 'pigment of our imagination'

London, Mar 9 (ANI): The colour pink does not actually exist, well it does, but only in our minds, say scientists.

The trouble, the researchers argue, lies in the fact that pink is a combination of red and violet, two colours, which are on the opposite sides of the spectrum in a rainbow.

So, pink can't exist in nature without bending the colours of the rainbow to allow red and violet to commingle, a theoretical impossibility.

As colour is a construct of our eyes and brains, when you look at a pink object you are not actually seeing pink wavelengths of light.

It only appears pink because certain wavelengths of light are reflected while others are absorbed, quenched, by the pigments.

Therefore Pink is a reflective colour, not a transmissive colour people can see it because the brain translates light bouncing off it.

Robert Krulwich presenter of the scientific radio show 'Radiolab' pointed out the conondrum this week describing it as a 'made-up colour'.

However Jill Morton, professor at the University of Hawaii who has consulted for Xerox, Kodak and others disagrees.

"Of course pink is a color. but with that said, pink is indeed not part of the light spectrum. It's an extra-spectral color, and it has to be mixed to generate it," the Daily Mail quoted Morton as telling popsci.com.

"If you take a tube of red paint and add white to it, you'll get pink. If you work with watercolors, take red paint and add a lot of water to it and put it on watercolor paper, that would be pink.

"Technically it's right that you can't generate pink in the rainbow colors. But you can mix other colors in light to get pink. ... This is about interpreting the visual world," she added. (ANI)