Kids: What makes a color a color?
Photo: mdezemery
You might have heard that black and white are not “true” colors. But it gets pretty complicated to talk about what makes a color a color.
Color isn’t a physical quality. It’s a phenomenon of light and perception.
Matter and energy are colorless, and it’s really our eyes and brains that make a fire engine red or chickens white. Colors are defined by their hue, saturation, and value.
Hue is what we think of as making blue blue, and not orange or grey.
Saturation refers to a color’s vividness – it’s what makes a pale blue sky different from one that’s deep blue – or pink different from red.
Value refers to a colored object’s lightness, darkness, and brightness – that’s the contrast between, say, the shining moon and a white plate.
Colors can only be talked about in terms of themselves – and how they differ from one another.
Black is black precisely because it has no redness or greenness or any other hue. But, to answer your question, black and white – and grey, for that matter, too – are colors. They’re neutral colors – different from each other only in terms of their darkness and lightness. Like all colors, black and white are products of our visual processes – they exist only because we’re there to sense them.
i love ponies and rainbows