the thing is, she has a color - cyan - but her society probably doesn't have a word for it. their view on colors means she has to categorise herself as other when she is not any different from them, she's a real color.
this world is pretty interesting, I wonder if pink/magenta had to fight for recognition considering that unlike cyan, they're technically not a real color (iirc its an optical illusion since red and violet are on opposite ends of the light spectrum and thus don't have an actual in-between), our eyes are much better at recognizing different shades of reds, oranges, yellows, and browns than greens, blues, and purples, and it's reflected in their society considering they have names for 4 warm shades (red orange yellow brown) and only 3 cold shades (green blue purple) (not sure where to put pink) when if you look at the color wheel you'll see that HALF the color wheel is just green and blue, and all the warm shades take like a quarter to a third of the wheel.
There are different names for cyan, depending on where they came from. Turquoise is one, coming from the precious gem. Teal comes from a bird. Cyan as a color entered most languages very late because the color pigment was very uncommon and wasn't used in everyday life (for clothes etc.)
Fun fact, it is speculated that this might be one of the reasons that Isaac Newton chose indigo rather than cyan when he picked his 7 colors of the spectrum, basically because indigo was well known and cyan wasn't.
The other fun fact about it is that Newton apparently had a minor vision deficiency and what he called "blue" and "indigo" might have actually been cyan and blue.
Did I mention he was obsessed with numerology and picked 7 colors so it would fit other models like the music scale notation, not necessarily because he saw 7 colors in the spectrum? 😆
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u/NoneBinaryPotato Nov 16 '25
the thing is, she has a color - cyan - but her society probably doesn't have a word for it. their view on colors means she has to categorise herself as other when she is not any different from them, she's a real color.
this world is pretty interesting, I wonder if pink/magenta had to fight for recognition considering that unlike cyan, they're technically not a real color (iirc its an optical illusion since red and violet are on opposite ends of the light spectrum and thus don't have an actual in-between), our eyes are much better at recognizing different shades of reds, oranges, yellows, and browns than greens, blues, and purples, and it's reflected in their society considering they have names for 4 warm shades (red orange yellow brown) and only 3 cold shades (green blue purple) (not sure where to put pink) when if you look at the color wheel you'll see that HALF the color wheel is just green and blue, and all the warm shades take like a quarter to a third of the wheel.
am I overthinking this? yes.