What color do we actually see?

We perceive only the reflected colors. Thus, red is not "in" an apple. The surface of the apple is reflecting the wavelengths we see as red and absorbing all the rest. An object appears white when it reflects all wavelengths and black when it absorbs them all.

Remember, the dress is actually blue and black, though most people saw it as white and gold, at least at first. My research showed that if you assumed the dress was in a shadow, you were much more likely to see it as white and gold. Why? Because shadows overrepresent blue light.

One Twitter user pointed out that seeing more than 11 shades is due to an optical illusion where the transition between the colours looks like a separate colour itself. This effect is known as the Mach Bands illusion – an optical phenomenon named after the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916).

You may ask the question, how many shades of pink are there in the world? Scientifically, there are around 29,000 different pink shades currently known to man. Each of these can be made with different combinations of red, white, yellow, and purple hues.

So how do we know there are 18 decillion colors? First of all, scientists have determined that in the lab we can see about 1,000 levels of dark-light and about 100 levels each of red-green and yellow-blue. So that's about 10 million colors right there. And then you have to allow for other matters.

drab dark brown

Pantone 448 C is a colour in the Pantone colour system. Described as a "drab dark brown" and informally dubbed the "ugliest colour in the world", it was selected in 2012 as the colour for plain tobacco and cigarette packaging in Australia, after market researchers determined that it was the least attractive colour.

Some consider white to be a color, because white light comprises all hues on the visible light spectrum. And many do consider black to be a color, because you combine other pigments to create it on paper. But in a technical sense, black and white are not colors, they're shades.

Vantablack is known as the darkest man made pigment. The color, which absorbs almost 100 percent of visible light, was invented by Surrey Nanosystems for space exploration purposes. The special production process and unavailability of vantablack to the general public makes it the rarest color ever.

Magenta doesn't exist because it has no wavelength; there's no place for it on the spectrum. The only reason we see it is because our brain doesn't like having green (magenta's complement) between purple and red, so it substitutes a new thing.

Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called "forbidden colors." Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they're supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously. The limitation results from the way we perceive color in the first place.

The color absolute zero with hexadecimal color code #0048ba is a medium dark shade of cyan-blue. In the RGB color model #0048ba is comprised of 0% red, 28.24% green and 72.94% blue. In the HSL color space #0048ba has a hue of 217° (degrees), 100% saturation and 36% lightness.

It's not only not a color, it's totally orthogonal to colors. Any color can be “clear”, meaning transparent or translucent, or opaque, meaning the opposite. Basically, “clear” is just a shortened way to refer to something that's transparent, or sometimes translucent.

Blue is the hardest color to see as more light energy is required for a full response from blue-violet cones, compared to green or red.

The negative meanings of purple are decadence, conceit, and pomposity. Purple is also a color of mourning. One of the most significant aspects of purple's symbolism is the generational divide.

Along with cones, photoreceptor cells called rods help the eye see during periods of low light. When it's dark, yellow takes over as the most visibly seen color from a distance.

On the other hand, since yellow is the most visible color of all the colors, it is the first color that the human eye notices. Use it to get attention, such as a yellow sign with black text, or as an accent.