Huh. Weird indeed.

Is pink the only color that isn't in the spectrum?

Yep. You have to turn the spectrum into a circle to fit it on.

That's so cool.

Whoa. That's totally rad.

Is pink the only color that isn't in the spectrum?

As far as I know, the spectrum has no earth tones.

Yeah, brown isn't a 'real' colour. It's really dark orange or yellow.

Magenta is a particularly interesting case, but in general colour perception is not well mapped to the scientific spectrum. It's also influenced by culture and language to a surprising degree. In this brief article, they describe a study done with a Papua New Guinean tribe who have one word for our two colours 'blue' and 'green', but two words within the range of colours considered 'yellow'.

It's more than just a name, though -- the language you use seems to affect the way you perceive and remember colours. In tests the tribespeople were shown a colour, and then later asked to pick it out from a choice of two colours. They performed better than English speakers at distinguishing and remembering colours across our 'yellow' range, while they performed worse at distinguishing the colours 'blue' and 'green'.

This Wikipedia article has a list of languages that have interesting or different terms for parts or all of the blue-green range.

That's okay, I don't like magenta anyway.

After staring at the magenta circle, and then looking at the blank white space, did anyone else see yellow, not green like the article said you should see?