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Purple is a color similar in appearance to violet light. In the RYB color model historically used in the arts, purple is a secondary color created by combining red and blue pigments. In the CMYK color model used in modern printing, purple is made by combining magenta pigment with either cyan pigment, black pigment, or both.
In common English usage, purple is a range of hues of color occurring between red and blue. [1] However, the meaning of the term purple is not well defined. There is confusion about the meaning of the terms purple and violet even among native speakers of English. [2]
Violet refers to any colour perceptually evoked by light with a predominant wavelength of roughly 380–450 nm. Tones of violet tending towards the blue are called indigo. Purple colors are colors that are various blends of violet or blue light with red light.
The theory of color includes the color complements; color balance; and classification of primary colors (traditionally red, yellow, blue ), secondary colors (traditionally orange, green, purple) and tertiary colors. The study of colors in general is called color science .
The complement of any primary color can be made by combining the two other primary colors. For example, to achieve the complement of yellow (a primary color) one could combine red and blue. The result would be purple, which appears directly across from yellow on the color wheel. [3]
Violet is closely associated with purple. In optics, violet is a spectral color (referring to the color of different single wavelengths of light), whereas purple is the color of various combinations of red and blue (or violet) light, [5] [6] some of which humans perceive as similar to violet.
The blue-dominated spectral color beyond blue is referred to as purple by many speakers in the United States, but this color is called violet by many speakers in the United Kingdom.
The color lavender might be described as a medium purple, a pale bluish purple, [4] or a light pinkish-purple. The term lavender may be used in general to apply to a wide range of pale, light, or grayish-purples, but only on the blue side; lilac is pale purple on the pink side. In paints, the color lavender is made by mixing purple and white paint.
The color of chemicals is a physical property of chemicals that in most cases comes from the excitation of electrons due to an absorption of energy performed by the chemical. What is seen by the eye is not the color absorbed, but the complementary color from the removal of the absorbed wavelengths.
Mauve ( / ˈmoʊv / ⓘ, mohv; [2] / ˈmɔːv / ⓘ, mawv) is a pale purple color [3] [4] named after the mallow flower (French: mauve ). The first use of the word mauve as a color was in 1796–98 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but its use seems to have been rare before 1859.