The Trouble With Red-Violet

The Twelve Part Color Wheel

starting at the top and going right is yellow, yellow-green, green,

blue-green, blue, blue-violet,violet, red-violet, red, red-orange,

orange, yellow-orange

While working on my previous blog post about the color brown, I was reminded of another color that has some interesting properties, red-violet. Red-violet is the warmest of the violets. Remember that the sun side of the color wheel is red, orange, and yellow, while the cool side is green, blue and violet. Red-violet is the warmest of the cool tcolors because it lies between red, certainly the color of the setting sun, and violet, the color of an evening sky, tender spring flowers, and the ocean in one of its moods.

The color wheel is based on the color spectrum, which is the rainbow that we see every summer. When light from the sun, called white light, passes through a prism, such as water droplets, or a special piece of glass, that white light is broken up or refracted into its component colors. So we see a rainbow divided into about seven hues: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Red is always at the top or outside of the rainbow and violet is always at the bottom or inside of the rainbow. Colors are actually wave lengths on the radiant spectrum that includes radio waves, microwaves, gamma rays, and cosmic rays. Red is about 700 nanometers, the longest of the wavelengths of color, while violet is the 400 nanometer range. Above red is infra-red and below violet is ultraviolet. There is no space for red-violet, an "impossible" color. And yet we see red-violet in the color of fuchsias. lilacs, and water lilies. It's a mystery to me.

By the way, violet is that beautiful color between red and blue, while purple to me is a very dark version of violet. One of my favorite colors is blue-violet, an elusive color. It is one of the colors I look best wearing. When I was a child, I was the brown-haired, brown-eyed child, while my sister was the blue-eyed, dark-blonde. She always got to wear blue and I always got to wear brown. To this day, I do not like to wear brown and have only a jacket of that color in my wardrobe. Now I dress in blue, blue-violet, and red-violet. And my little sister? She still looks great in blue.