Does square enix hate purple?

[Iscah]

The only contex where red, yellow and blue are primary colours is in the kindergarten introduced colour wheel which is mostly just a social construct rather than a useful tool.

It's a perfectly useful tool for an artist. Things don't lose their value just because they were true when you were in kindergarten. You only need to look at one - the colours and their mixes are there. They do blend into a ring. You can take a collection of random objects and arrange them like that and have it make sense - or you can look at a rainbow with its red on one end and violet on the other and think that yes, it's not a far leap to join those two ends of the colour sequence together.

And the fact you can mix reds and blues to create purples - whether it happens on the object or in your mind - gives validity to it. It can be portrayed as a wheel because those colours do combine, even if the spectrum is a straight line.

There are other ways of arranging colour of course. The larger colour-pencil sets seem to use white, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, blue, green, brown, grey, black. But that's a different way of thinking, aiming to create a linear flow of colours that won't join back up again - and arguably arranged so they can keep that red-purple-blue link, instead choosing to split the sequence at a point where they can easily connect the shades that are left out of the wheel. That seems logical to me from a visual interpretation of it.

Orange and brown exist. Oranges are the various wavelengths of light between red and yellow, and browns are just those wavelengths with lower saturation.

Purple doesn't exist in the sense that there's no pure wavelength of light we can ever associate with it. (Caveat here that indigo/violet, which do have pure wavelengths, often get colloquially lumped in with purple/magenta.) Purple/magenta is just an optical illusion resulting from how our biology works. In a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening, our brains take the RBG signals we receive and sort of average them out. Since both the red and blue sensors are being triggered our brain would ordinarily average that out to be green since that's the wavelength of light that lies between the two, but our green sensors aren't being triggered at all so our brain makes up the magenta/purple colour to be able to process that conflict. This has the illusionary effect of linking the red and blue ends of the physically linear colour spectrum into a perceptually circular one.

Trying to argue that "purple isn't a colour because it doesn't have a pure wavelength associated with it" is like trying to argue that tomatoes aren't vegetables because they're fruits. They're both things at once according to two unrelated sets of criteria with overlapping terms.

By the same logic, purple isn't a spectral colour but it's a visual colour. It might not strictly exist to a scientist studying the properties of light but it absolutely exists to an artist. Anything that isn't a primary colour is a illusory blend of different colours to us, whether it lies within the spectrum or not. We don't only see the strict spectral definitions of colours while being blind to anything inbetween.

In fact, if I'm reading the Wikipedia articles right, it's violet that doesn't exist on any display using an RGB colour system as it can't be reproduced with only red and blue light, and has to be approximated as a purple.


On a side note, it's interesting to see that the exact secondary colours of RGB light are yellow, cyan and magenta.