How does the colour get into colour?

Question

What i mean by this question is black and whites are shades of colours, but for an example, the colour blue, how does it turn blue, are there chemicals or something that react to make the colour.

Like peoples eye colour, the information is in our genes, but how does the colour get there, are their hormones that make the colour etc?

For example...as a comment has said that it is refelction of light.

By mixing colours together, this makes a different colour, but how does the colour get there is the first place...How does the colour get into the specrum in the first place?

If you had a tin of blue paint, how did it get blue?

Answer 1

Color (colour) is the result of certain objects reflecting or absorbing certain wavelengths of light. For example, someone with blue eyes does not "really" have blue eyes. Rather, their eyes absorb light at every visible wavelength except blue, and reflect the light at the blue wavelength. This reflected light is interpreted by your eye as blue. Black and white are the result of things that either absorb (black) or reflect (white) all light in the visible spectrum.
The same is true with anything else. For example, an orange absorbs light of wavelengths that are greater and smaller than orange, but reflects the light that appears orange to us.
I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're loking for, but I hope it helps.

Answer 2

The light reacts with chemical compounds. When light hits an object some of it is absorbed, some of it bounces back, and some passes through. You only see the light that bounces back from the object. the color depends on which end of the light spectrum is absorbed and passes through. For example, if high frequency light is absorbed (the blue end) you will see an orange color. This is a very simplified example. In nature you will rarely see an object that is all orange or red, but that's the basic mechanics of what is going on. You really have to study physics to understand how light and color really works.

Answer 3

Color is an apparent phenomenon - that is, it exists only in your mind. Your perception of color is based on light-detecting pigment molecules in the retina of your eyes; there are three different types of these, which have optimal absorption in the blue, green, and yellow-green portions of the visual spectrum (which goes from red to violet - you've seen rainbows). So, if some object stimulates mostly the blue pigment molecules more, your brain will interpret this as the object being "blue" - if it stimulates the blue and green very little and mostly stimulates the yellow-green, the brain will interpret this as the object being "red", etc.

However, there's a number of different ways this can happen. Let's say an object is emitting two frequencies of light in equal amounts - one at the violet end of the spectrum and one at the red end of the spectrum. Your brain won't interpret this as two colors, though - since all three pigments will be stimulated, and the green pigment will be stimulated the most (it gets a little bit of stimulation from each frequency of light), you'll see something in the middle of the spectrum - probably green or blue-green. So, the color that you see is a MIX of all the frequencies of light that an object emits.

Now, what makes different obejcts emit different kinds of light? Well, there's various different reasons, but mostly they come down to chemistry - specifically, different chemicals absorb some frequencies of light more and others less. The color of an object reflects the sum total of this absorption/non-absorption. Whatever light is NOT absorbed, and whatever light is re-emitted (possibly as a result of "fluorescence"), reaches your eye, stimulates the three pigments in your retina to various degrees, and is interpreted by your brain as an average of all those frequencies.

In the case of eyes, there are specific pigment molecules (different from the ones in your retina!) that exist in the iris to make them blue, brown, green, etc.

Answer 4

Assuming you mean color in reflected light, not emitted light:

White light has all the colors in it. Different substances absorb different colors of light and reflect the rest. For example, a red crayon absorbs most orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet light that hits it and reflects the red light, which then hits your eyes so you see it as "red". So color is determined by what an object is made of. Most of the absorption and reflection effects are determined by how electrons are arranged in the molecules that make up the substance. Good quantum mechanics stuff.

Yes, our genes tell our bodies what chemicals to put into our irises, which causes the colors of our eys.

Answer 5

A colour is a substance that absorbs all the colours of the light spectrum except the colour that you see. It reflects the colour that it exhibits and absorbs the colours you don't see emitted from it.
You see the colour it reflects from the light spectrum.

Answer 6

Colors are caused by the length of the light waves and the medium either reflecting or absorbing the various length light waves. Any light wave that is reflected is seen and absorbed waves are not seen.

Answer 7

it has to do with the reflection of light off an object.. different objects reflect light at different points on the spectrum.. it has more to do with physics than chemistry..

Answer 8

it happens when light reflects off things like us!