6 Colourful Things That Are Not Actually What You See

Unless you are a colour blind person, you see the world in its beautiful, vibrant glory, right? Where roses are red and violets are purple and your friend has a dark grey Persian cat. But do you know that the colourful world that you think you are seeing is actually your brain tricking you into thinking so?

Well, I hate to break it to you, but…

1. The sky is not blue

The sky is actually colourless. But during day-time, when we look at it, it appears to be blue because the molecules in the atmosphere scatter blue light from the sunlight more than red light. Basically they give blue light a get-pass. But the ‘colour’ of the sky can change depending on the atmosphere, like in heavily polluted areas, sky appears to be white generally.

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2. The sun is so not yellow

Have you ever seen sunlight getting refracted through a prism? Then you must have seen how it gets broken into the colours of the rainbow. That is because sunlight consists of all the colours of the spectrum, which actually makes the sun white, which you’ll be able to see if you could look at it from space without going blind. But it appears yellow because of the ‘filter’ that earth’s atmosphere works as.

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3. And neither is the full moon

You must have noticed that the moon always seems yellowish in the naked eye, but the pictures of the moon taken from space always look a bit dull greyish. Well, that dull grey is actually how moon does look. The various different elements of our atmosphere make a filter that does not allow all the wave-lengths to go through with equal freedom. For some colours, it’s easy while for the others it’s very difficult. And that’s the very reason why it appears yellow sometimes.

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4. Oh, and by the way, black is not a colour

Well, if we are to be scientifically accurate, then we cannot call black a colour. Black is basically an absence of colour, as it absorbs all light. We experience the ‘colour’ black when none of the visible lights reach our eye.

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5. And space, as we see it, is not black

Despite what you see, or what every Hollywood movie depicting space show, it is not black. Rather, it is mostly green, as well as red, blue, and purple sometimes, according to Stan Solomon of HAO (High Altitude Observatory).

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6. Your blue veins are not blue either

Different wavelengths of light have different type of difficulty while travelling through the skin. While red light is able to penetrate the skin and reach the veins where it is mostly absorbed by the blood. But blue light is not able to do so in its entirety and some of it gets reflected back, hence the bluish veins. Same reason why it appears greenish sometimes. Wherever your skin is very thin, the veins appear to be red.

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Even your body is tricking you…seriously, what a sad life!

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