• Question: if you mix all colours, do you get white blacko or a rainbow

    Asked by anon-200929 to Leigh on 4 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Leigh Kesler

      Leigh Kesler answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      It’s interesting to think about mixing colors (apologies for my American English 😉 ), because it depends on if you’re mixing pigments or light.

      We often mean pigments, or the colors of objects around us. When an object appears to be a certain color, e.g. red, that means that the object is reflected red light back at our eyes, while absorbing the other colors of light. If you start mixing pigments together, you will eventually get a brown or black color, because then the object/pigment is absorbing ALL the light and reflecting very little back to our eyes.

      On the other hand, white light is light that is composed of all the colors, while blackness/darkness is the absence of any color of light. So if start mixing different colors of light together, eventually you get white light.

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