The colors of the rainbow make the color wheel seem simple— a couple reds, purples, blues and greens and you’re on your way. However, the color spectrum is actually a vast and complex beast. The human eye can only see a fraction of the colors on earth and, of those, we aren’t familiar with all of them. Scientists are also constantly innovating colors for a variety of applications, such as space travel and exploration.
Read the list below to discover some rare hues you might not recognize that would make any painter green with envy.
Color Family: Blue
Complementary Colors: Oranges
Found in Nature: Yes
photo source: iColorpalette
Although absolute zero is mostly associated with temperature, it also describes a shade of blue. The shade rests somewhere between vibrant and muted since it isn’t as deep as midnight blue, but is also not as pale as baby blue. It is a mixture of blue and green that contains no red.
Did you know
In terms of temperature, absolute zero describes the coldest possible temperature. It is minus 273.15 in Celsius and minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.
Color Family: Blue and/or Green
Complementary Colors: Red-Orange
Found in Nature: Yes
photo source: ColorHexa
Xanadu is very similar to another color on this list, glaucous, and, arguably, rests under the glaucous umbrella of truly blue-green hues. According to ColorHexa, xanadu is made up of almost equal parts red, green and blue. It comes off as grayish and is a little darker than glaucous.
Did you know
The word Xanadu actually means an idyllic or luxurious place.
Color Family: Orange
Complementary Colors: Blues
Found in Nature: Yes
photo source: Onceuponalexicon.wordpress.com
Sarcoline might sound unfamiliar, but the shade is most likely recognizable to any makeup enthusiast or portrait artist. It resembles a pale skin tone with yellow undertones. Placing sarcoline within a color family is difficult since its lighter shades appear yellow and beige, the middle shades are orange, and the darkest shades are brown.
Did you know
Crayola released its first box of skin tone crayons in 1992 in response to feedback from customers and educators who wanted more diversity in art, especially based toward children
Color Family: Brown
Complementary Colors: Blues
Found in Nature: Yes
photo source: Maryland Zoo
While fulvous is considered a shade of brown, it appears more as a dark orange. Fulvous is made of mostly red, a bit of green and no blue. Lighter versions of this color definitely fall into the orange scale, while darker shades become deep browns.
Did you know
The fulvous whistling duck is a great example of the color in nature. The color is evident in its brown orange feathers, which explains its name.
Color Family: Blue and/or Green
Complementary Colors: Red-Orange
Found in Nature: Yes
photo source: The Awl
Glaucous describes a blend of green and blue— the kind of color that starts debates about which one it truly is. The term glaucous, which is etymologically related to the word glaucoma, comes from ancient Greek. The famous philosopher Homer used the term glaukos to refer to water, leaves, honey and eyes. Rather than a single color, the original term referred to an object’s ability to glisten or shine. Over the years, as language developed to include specific terms for colors, glaukos became glaucous and started to refer to blue-green colors. Since glaucous is archaic, it’s difficult to find accurate representations of the color today.
Did you know
Glaucous also refers to the waxy protective coating that fruits like apples naturally develop.
Color Family: Red
Complementary Colors: Greens
Found in Nature: Yes
photo source: Clarissa Wei via Smithsonian
Take a trip to the Swedish countryside and you’ll notice that most of the cottages are the same shade of bright red. This particular shade is falu red, termed such because the color comes from the Falun Copper Mine in Sweden. It’s a waste byproduct of the mining process that rusts over time. Washing, drying and burning these rusted over ores creates the unique pigment. The temperature in which the byproduct is heated changes the shade. Higher temperatures result in darker pigment.
Did you know
The Falun copper mine has been around since the ninth century and was one of Sweden’s greatest income sources until the seventeenth century.
Color Family: Red
Complementary Colors: Greens
Found in Nature: No
photo source: Stuart Semple
Stuart Semple’s self proclaimed “pinkest pink” is the result of art world controversy. After the creation and subsequent development of a usable vantablack, another color on this list, the company that invented the technology exclusively licensed it to an artist named Anish Kapoor. Other artists were upset that this color was being kept from them and one, named Stuart Semple, decided to respond in turn. Semple created the pinkest pink pigment and made it available to everyone except Kapoor. Kapoor got his hands on it anyway, posting a picture to Instagram with his middle finger dipped in the vibrant pigment.
Did you know
Much of Stuart Semple’s art is made in bright colors and styles similar to Andy Warhol’s pop art works.
Color Family: Yellow
Complementary Colors: Purple
Found in Nature: No
photo source: Kremer Pigment
The Shepherd Color Company developed the Niobium Tin Pyrochlore (NTP) yellow pigment to bridge the gap between brightness and durability. Different versions of NTP yellow have distinct purposes— one is ideal for coloring plastic while another is better as a coating and/or paint. This invention demonstrates Shepherd’s focus on inorganic materials to mimic naturally occurring colors and innovate new pigments.
Did you know
Physicists and chemists invent new colors for a variety of applications by studying the natural world. New colors can help with heat absorbency, camouflage and reflectivity.
Color Family: Orange
Complementary Colors: Blue
Found in Nature: No
photo source: Kremer Pigmente
The Shepherd Color Company also developed the Rutile Tin Zinc orange pigment to make other colors appear more vibrantly red. In addition to a stronger hue, RTZ orange also gives different paints and coatings increased heat stability and better weathering. Like NTP yellow, RTZ orange is also ideal for chemists and others working in scientific spaces because it works well in high pH environments.
Did you know
The color orange is named after the fruit. The word has Sanskrit origins and was first used to refer to the fruit in English in the 1300s. References to the color in English didn’t come up until the sixteenth century.
Color Family: Blue
Complementary Colors: Oranges
Found in Nature: Yes
photo source: Oregon State University
YINMN blue is a recently discovered vibrant shade of blue that occurs when the compound manganese oxide is heated at 2,000 Fahrenheit (1,200 Celsius). A graduate student at the University of Oregon discovered the color during this experiment and recognized it as scientifically interesting. Blue pigments tend to be unstable and dangerous, but YINMN blue is neither. The color is made of the elements yttrium, indium and manganese.
Did you know
Ancient cultures used chromotherapy, which is the use of colors to heal certain ailments.
Color Family: Black shades
Complementary Colors: None
Found in Nature: No
photo source: Electronicsweekly.com
Vantablack is known as the darkest man made pigment. The color, which absorbs almost 100 percent of visible light, was invented by Surrey Nanosystems for space exploration purposes. The special production process and unavailability of vantablack to the general public makes it the rarest color ever. It now exists as a coating used in deep space imaging, automotive sensing, optical systems, and art. Some of its most notable properties include ultra low reflectance, UV absorption, and high thermal shock resistance. Vantablack’s visual effect is quite striking. Rather than a painted surface, objects coated in vantablack look two dimensional.
Did you know
Vantablack absorbs so much light that no spectrometer can accurately determine what percentage it actually takes in.
FAQs
What is the rarest color in the world? ›
1. Lapis Lazuli. Lapus Lazuli is a blue mineral so rare that in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it was actually more valuable than gold.
What is the rarest favorite color? ›Yellow is the least favorite color, preferred by only five percent of people. Another interesting survey finding: both men and women increasingly dislike orange as they age!
What is the rarest color found in nature? ›But when it comes to nature, blue is very rare. Less than 1 in 10 plants have blue flowers and far fewer animals are blue. So why is that? Part of the reason is that there isn't really a true blue colour or pigment in nature and both plants and animals have to perform tricks of the light to appear blue.
What is the legendary color? ›Legendary is a soft, gray, millennial beige with a silvery undertone. It is a perfect paint color for a living room or exterior home.
What is the oldest color? ›By crushing 1.1 billion-year-old rocks found beneath the Sahara Desert, scientists say they have discovered the world's oldest color: bright pink.
Which is the most beautiful color? ›Thus, the most attractive color is blue, the second most preferred is red, followed by green, while yellow was found to be the least preferred color (Figure 1).
What color do guys like most on a girl? ›Studies reveal that red is the most attractive colour to both men and women but, curiously, the two genders are attracted to the same colour for different reasons.
What is the friendliest color? ›Yellow symbolizes happiness and warmth in almost all cultures. It's the color that grabs users' attention more than any other color. McDonald's and IKEA both use yellow in their branding to give off the feeling of friendliness and positivity.
What is the most mysterious color? ›Purple is the most mysterious and elusive of them. The uncertainty of whether a purple hue is reddish or bluish, is never dispelled. In a different light, purple can appear to be completely different. Functionally: Purple is a popular color in advertising.
Are there colors that we can't see? ›Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called "forbidden colors." Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they're supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously.
What colors don't exist in nature? ›
One reason is that true blue colours or pigments simply don't exist in nature, and plants and animals have to perform tricks to appear blue, according to the University of Adelaide. Take blue jays for example, which only appear blue due to the structure of their feathers, which distort the reflection of light.
What eye color is rarest? ›Green is considered by some to be the actual rarest eye color in the world, though others would say it's been dethroned by red, violet, and grey eyes. Green eyes don't possess a lot of melanin, which creates a Rayleigh scattering effect: Light gets reflected and scattered by the eyes instead of absorbed by pigment.
What color starts with u? ›| Name | Hex | Web Safe HTML |
|---|---|---|
| Ultramarine | #120A8F | #000099 |
| Ultra Violet | #4b019c | #330099 |
PURPLE. Purple has been associated with royalty in the past and is often thought of as a luxury color. Think about beauty products and anti-aging lines–more times than not, they will incorporate a shade of purple in the branding.
What is the newest color invented? ›YInMn Blue (/jɪnmɪn/; for the chemical symbols Y for yttrium, In for indium, and Mn for manganese), also known as Oregon Blue or Mas Blue, is an inorganic blue pigment that was discovered by Mas Subramanian and his (then) graduate student, Andrew Smith, at Oregon State University in 2009.
What is warmest color? ›Absolutely warm and cool colors can be found at 0 (red – the warmest color) and 180 (cyan – the coolest color) degrees. Determining whether one color is warmer or cooler than another can be measured by their proximities to these poles.
What color was the first human on Earth? ›These early humans probably had pale skin, much like humans' closest living relative, the chimpanzee, which is white under its fur. Around 1.2 million to 1.8 million years ago, early Homo sapiens evolved dark skin.
What is the most forgotten color? ›- Gamboge.
- Glaucous.
- Sarcoline.
- Skobeloff.
- Smaragdine.
- Wenge.
- Vantablack.
- Zaffre.
Young babies are indeed capable of seeing colors, but their brains may not perceive them as clearly or vividly as older children and adults do. The first primary color your baby can see is red, and this happens a few weeks into life.
What color makes people like you? ›#1 Color Psychology and Attraction
Either way, the color red gets your attention. A study shows that men or women are attracted to each other by the color red, but for different reasons.
What are the 3 most attractive colors? ›
Thus, the most attractive color is blue, the second most preferred is red, followed by green, while yellow was found to be the least preferred color (Figure 1).
What is the most tasty color? ›Indeed, the results of both online and in-lab tests have revealed that the majority of people match the taste of salt with white and blue, sweetness with red and pink, while sourness is associated with green and yellow, and bitterness with browny-black and violet/purple.
What color attracts money? ›Attracting Money: Decorate in Red, Purple or Green
Think of walking the red carpet or wearing a red power tie," explains Laura. Purple and green are also key colors for attracting prosperity but there's a hitch.
- Anything red.
- Lace.
- Sleeveless tops.
- Off-the-shoulder tops.
- Crop tops.
- Bodycon clothes.
- Leather jacket.
- T-shirt and jeans.
Nuances from the nude range such as cream or beige are considered particularly attractive. Well-kept nails with transparent polish or in light shades of pink are also particularly appealing to men.
What color makes you sleepy? ›Red light. Red light is by far the best calming light color for sleep. Choosing a red light as a nightlight ensures that you don't disrupt your circadian rhythm. So switching to a red light a few hours before going to bed will surely help you fall asleep easier.
What color is for intelligence? ›BLUE. Blue symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth and heaven.
What color means kindness? ›Psychology Behind the Color Green
Green is often associated with nature, health, healing, the environment, reliability, generosity, and practicality. It encourages generosity, kindness, and sympathy.
The investigators found that the color red produced the most intense pain, followed by green and blue. Other colors were associated with less pain. The results are not necessarily intuitive.
What color is sadness? ›Grey is the quintessential sad color, but dark and muted cool colors like blue, green or neutrals like brown or beige can have a similar effect on feelings and emotions depending on how they're used. In Western cultures black is often considered the color of mourning, whereas in some East Asian countries it's white.
What color represents love? ›
Red: Passion, Love, Anger. Orange: Energy, Happiness, Vitality. Yellow: Happiness, Hope, Deceit. Green: New Beginnings, Abundance, Nature.
Is black a color we Cannot see? ›As any rainbow will demonstrate, black isn't on the visible spectrum of color. All other colors are reflections of light, except black. Black is the absence of light. Unlike white and other hues, pure black can exist in nature without any light at all.
What colors can dogs not see? ›So What's the Truth About Dog Color Blindness? Having yellow-blue dichromatic vision means that dogs are most similar to a red-green color blind person. They are very good at distinguishing between variations of blues and yellows (and whites and grays), but cannot really see red and green all that well.
Can you see color blind? ›Color blindness is an often misunderstood condition. Many assume because of its name that “color blind” means a person can only see in black and white. In actuality, the vast majority of people with color blindness do see color, but they see a much narrower range of color.
What color Cannot be created? ›First, no two colors can be mixed to create a primary color. In other words, primary colors can only be created through the use of natural pigments. Secondly, all other colors found on the color wheel can be created by mixing primary colors together. The secondary colors are orange, green, and purple.
Can humans create new colors? ›For tens of thousands of years, humans have created colours through simple chemistry. At first we used dyes found in nature such as berries and charcoal. Later, new pigments were synthesised in the lab.
Can we invent a new color? ›Today researchers use physics to invent new colours, inspired perhaps by the iridescent shades created by structures in butterfly wings that scatter light. These new structural colours are the result of an interaction between light and nanoscale features many times thinner than human hair.
What color is dragon blood? ›Dragon's blood is a surprising red made from the resin of the Daemonorops draco plant and other rattan palms. This exotic red was used by the early Greeks, Romans and Arabs in art and medicine.
What is the unique color? ›A unique hue is defined as a color which an observer perceives as a pure, without any admixture of the other colors. Ewald Hering first defined the unique hues as red, green, yellow, and blue, and based them on the concept that these colors could not be simultaneously perceived.
What colors are females attracted to? ›The study found statistically significant gender differences in relation to yellow, white and green-yellow. All three colors were perceived as more attractive by women than by men. Results from our study show that chromatic colors have been perceived as more attractive than achromatic, with exception for black.
What is the most feared color? ›
In an online survey conducted with more than 100 respondents, it was discovered that black is the color that is associated with fear the most. Black is the color of the night.
What colors are evil dragons? ›Five evil-aligned dragons (white dragon, black dragon, green dragon, blue dragon, and red dragon), and the lawful-good aligned golden dragon (in ascending order of magic power and capabilities) first appeared in the original Dungeons & Dragons "white box" set (1974).
What color is dragon Eye? ›Dragon's Eye, 4838 is a fantastic surface color that has a wide range of possibilities. This color is a green tone, with enough color changing silver to allow organic shifts without overpowering the base green.
Is blood blue or black? ›Share on Pinterest It is a myth that deoxygenated blood is blue; all blood in the human body is red. Human blood contains hemoglobin, which is a complex protein molecule in red blood cells. Hemoglobin contains iron. The iron reacts with oxygen, giving blood its red color.
Do purple eyes exist? ›Unbelievable as it may seem, the answer is yes—natural purple eyes do exist. Purple eyes are also commonly referred to as “violet eyes,” as they are typically a light shade.
Can eyes change color? ›Changes in eye color are rare. Sometimes, the color of your eye may appear to change when your pupils dilate. The colors in your environment, including lighting and your clothes, can give the illusion of eye color change.
What is the prettiest eye color? ›We found that green is the most popular lens colour, with brown coming in a close second, despite it being one of the most common eye colours. Although blue and hazel are seen as the most attractive eye colours for men and women they are surprisingly the least popular.
What is the most fancy color? ›Google "the most expensive pigment" and you'll find that Lapis Lazuli is believed to be the most expensive pigment ever created. It was pricier than its weight in gold.
What is the longest color word? ›Permanent Geranium Lake is the longest name for a color.
Is color an illusion? ›Despite the extraordinary experience of color perception, all colors are mere illusions, in the sense that, although naive people normally think that objects appear colored because they are colored, this belief is mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are colored, but colors are the result of neural processes.