White light can be blinding, cold, unforgiving. Our physical reality often finds it too much as well, splitting it apart any chance it gets. Plants are green because such wavelengths of light help it keep a consistent vacuum on the electromagnetic energy it slurps from the sun. The sky is blue because of atmospheric particles that scatter light in slower wavelengths. The skin of an apple, a cherry, a tomato: all different ways of twisting light into hues of red. But despite attempts from the best scientists and philosophers, what color truly is, if it’s even anything tangible, remains elusive.

When it comes to the vexing problem of red or any other gradient, when we both agree that a thing is some color, is it really exactly the same as the color in your mind? Put another way, we might ask: is color even real?

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Democritus believed that light refracting through atoms caused the phenomenon that we perceive and describe conventionally, or by mutual agreement, as color. By contrast, Aristotle believed that color inhered in objects. Throughout the scientific revolutions of the 17th Century, color was dismissed, along with other aesthetic properties like scent, as a secondary quality — that is, one lacking the explanatory role in the behavior of physical objects of so-called primary qualities, like motion or size or shape. Color was a frill, and perhaps an illusion. David Hume, the 18th Century philosopher, described it as “the phantasm of the senses.”

Unsurprising to some people, but most of what we learn in primary school about color is wrong.

We are taught the rainbow is composed of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, and sometimes that there are invisible colors, infrared and ultraviolet, on either side. And we learn that there are three primary colors — red, yellow and blue — from which all other colors can be mixed. We play with them, as paints or Playdoh, and observe some rather muddy mixing. That’s because it’s not true that you can mix every color you can perceive — the very act of mixing reduces a component color’s chroma, or degree of vividness, which is an essential part of that particular color.

If we’re hallucinating, we may not be hallucinating exactly the same thing.

We might be told that color has something to do with light, or even be shown a prism, through which light refracts to produce a rainbow. This is true, but the human brain and visual system can perceive more colors than are found in a spectrum or rainbow. We might learn that black is not technically a color, and that white is all the colors combined. But actually, black is a color, as well as white — they are achromatic colors, meaning those lacking chroma (a level of vividness or mutedness, similar to saturation) and hue (the general family a color belongs such as green or yellow.)

In high school, we go on to learn that images are produced by the action of light bouncing off an object and interacting with our visual systems: our eyes, our brains, and the nerves and chemical messengers that connect them. It’s all very physical, very real. According to the Colour Literacy Project, from which Salon learned to bust all of the above color myths, what we learn about color is mostly wrong.

In fact, our visual systems are able to work on light from just one small part of the electromagnetic spectrum — the part ranging from violet light, which moves in quick, short wavelengths, over to red, with its slower, lower frequency, longer wavelength. Other creatures have visual systems that are responsive to different frequencies of light, with birds and butterflies able to perceive wavelengths in the ultraviolet range.

Flowers are of course well-known for their range of color, but have actually evolved entire palettes of color that humans can’t perceive. A daisy tinged with ultraviolet petals signals to a bumblebee: dinner’s served. But to us, it can appear as just a dull white or yellow. So clearly some colors “exist” in a way that we can’t totally wrap our minds around.

Ultraviolet induced visible fluorescence, the natural fluorescence of flowers (Jose David Ruiz Barba / Getty........

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