TL;DR – w skrócieIn so-called “color psychology,” red carries the most meanings: it stimulates, fuels aggression and spurs us to action. Yet for all these colorful, fiery descriptions, Polish seems short on truly punchy idioms about red. Even the proverbial red rag to a bull is just a “cloth to a bull” in Polish, with the red only implied. You can also blush crimson or, finally, turn red with anger at the thought of what follows.
Pink, you see, is a different story. In the same “color psychology,” it’s really red’s younger brother: romance, compassion, tenderness, affection. You either love it or hate it.
A physicist and a chemist would agree with me. It would be a hard sell, though, to a parent who has just ordered thirty liters of “Cotton Candy” paint for the walls of their kid’s room.
In short, there’s no electromagnetic wavelength that corresponds to pink. Light visible to humans has wavelengths from 380 to 780 nanometers, a tiny slice of the whole spectrum. Ever seen a rainbow? There’s violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red.
The photoreceptors at the back of the human eye that handle color vision come in three types. Each is most sensitive to a different kind of light: long-, medium- or short-wavelength, with peak sensitivity at around 560, 530 and 420 nanometers respectively. Their sensitivity ranges partly overlap, and the names “red,” “green” and “blue” are just shorthand.
The ancients were already exploring the mysteries of color, but a truly solid theory didn’t emerge until the 19th century: the trichromatic theory, also known as the Young–Helmholtz theory. It was Thomas Young who hypothesized that the retina contains three types of “nerve fibers” that react to the full range of visible light, but each one responds most strongly to its “own” specialized wavelength. Stimulating all three equally produces the sensation of white.
Today we know more precisely that the retina is a collection of cones and rods. A single eye has up to 120 million rods, yet in simple terms they only see light or its absence: they register brightness, not color. We have only 6–7 million cones, but they’re the ones you need most when crossing the street. They come in the three types described above, and it’s from their signals that the brain creates color.
When more than one type of cone receives a signal, our brain, to put it very simply, decides to average the colors out. When red and green reach the eye at the same time, we see yellow (is that a banana?). Yellow does have its own wavelength and place in the rainbow, but the brain can also build it from red and green. That’s how a phone screen makes yellow, too.
The real magic happens, though, when the eye receives signals from both ends of the wavelength range: blue and red. That’s when the brain breaks the laws of conventional physics (and style) and creates a new color, pink, somewhere between blue-violet and red. Strictly speaking, this non-spectral color is magenta, and pink covers the light shades between magenta and red.
Pink has no counterpart among the electromagnetic wavelengths of visible light. That doesn’t mean, however, that fans of the color will just vanish, as if I were Neo choosing the pill that’s… Well, what color, exactly?
All colors are subjective and made in our heads. That’s constructivism in action.
And since color is largely created in the viewer’s head, choosing colors for brand communication shouldn’t be left to chance. We write about how brands play on customers’ senses and emotions in our article on sensory marketing. For tips on combining colors, typography and shapes into a consistent graphic motif, read 5 graphic designer tips: how to create a key visual.
Want your brand’s colors to evoke the right associations? We’ll help you choose a color palette and design a consistent visual identity. Write to us and we’ll talk about your brand.
