Why the color pink doesn’t actually exist
Black dandyism, solving the “blank canvas” problem, and participating in this life (Issue #326)
When I was a kid, I used to wonder if my blue might be someone else’s pink. There was no way to compare what colors actually looked like inside each other’s minds. It felt like a glitch in the system. As physicist explains, that sense of subjectivity is built into how vision works. Color, as it turns out, is less a feature of the world and more a story the brain tells to make sense of light.
Take pink. When you see a flash of it — in a sunset, a flower, a neon sign — it feels as natural as red, blue, or yellow. But pink isn’t part of the visible light spectrum. There’s no “pink” wavelength. So what are we seeing?
John explains that pink is something your brain invents when it encounters a gap between red and blue wavelengths. If you break white light into its components using a prism, you’ll see a rainbow, and pink is nowhere in it. Instead, when your eyes receive a mix of strong red and strong blue light, but not much green, your brain fills in the blank. Even your screens fake it, combining just red, green, and blue pixels into millions of colors the brain stitches together.
That gap in perception only gets wider in people with synesthesia. As Eleanor Cummins explains in Popular Science, synesthetes experience a blending of senses: hearing colors, tasting words, seeing time. The musician Lorde has said her songs have hues. And the writer Nabokov recalled each letter as having a distinct shade or texture. In such cases, researchers have found unusual axon growth, or neural pathways stretching farther and connecting in unexpected ways. The result is a reality processed through a different sensory lens.
Perception stretches even further outside our species. Birds have an extra type of light receptor that lets them see ultraviolet patterns invisible to the human eye. Their world isn’t just more colorful. It includes shades we physically can’t register.
When even birds live in a palette we can’t imagine, it’s hard not to feel like we’re only seeing a sliver of what’s really there. Just as when I was a kid, I still wonder what colors someone else is really seeing — and what colors might exist just beyond the limits of human perception.
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🎩 Also today…
- The theme of Monday’s Met Gala was Black dandyism, and as style analyst explains, it originated in the 1700s when formerly enslaved men adopted the fashions of European elites at the time (top hats, suits, canes), not as an assimilation tactic, but “to claim agency to counter oppressive stereotypes of Blackness and create a class of their own.”
- A product designer details how AI could (potentially) solve the “blank canvas” problem that plagues all creatives: “we’re seeing companies prefer users to type in their prompt — and the product helps generate exactly what they wanted as a quick first draft.” ()
- “Creativity isn’t just decoration, it’s memory. It’s identity. It’s how we process what it means to be alive and confused and feeling too much all the time.” —
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