My mind is blown right now, and I need to share what I’m learning.
- Purple doesn’t exist?
2. Some regions of English speakers see violet and purple differently, and some don’t?
3. The reason I struggle to find the “right” purple for my colouring might be that I like violet but not purple?
Friends, let’s figure this out! Starting with the basics: What is violet, and what is purple?
- Purple only exists in our brains.
Science buffs probably already know this, but I didn’t (and please correct anything I get wrong – I’m paraphrasing to consolidate my learning). The human eye can see a range of colours between ultraviolet and infrared. We see violet when light comes into our eyes and triggers blue with a hint of red.
On the flip side, purple doesn’t exist anywhere along the light spectrum, so it isn’t a “spectral” colour. Purple is a colour our brains create when an equal mix of blue and red light hit our eyes. Same goes for magenta – it isn’t a spectral colour, it is a mix that our brain perceives with a mix of light at the two ends of the visible spectrum.
If my explanation doesn’t make sense, please check out the video about and this article, which is the course of all the above images.
2. Some regions of English speakers see violet and purple differently, and some don’t?
In Canada, I almost never hear the word violet use to describe colours. In fact, I recently dyed my hair “ultraviolet” for a month, and kept wondering what it was called violet (a synonym purple in my brain) when it really came out as periwinkle blue when made pastel? Well duh, Gillian, turns out the name was correct. Violet is mostly blue with a hint of red.
According to several articles I’ve read, British people distinguish between violet and purple more than North Americans, who call everything purple. Friends, is this true?
“Language plays a role, too – there’s a difference even between British English and American English. The colour beyond blue on the spectrum is called purple in the US, but violet in the UK. Reddish-purple is sometimes called violet in the US, but hardly so in Britain. The complete range of colours between red and blue is often called purple in British texts, but sometimes the word violet is used, too.”
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-it-took-us-thousands-of-years-to-see-the-colour-violet
3. The reason I struggle to find the “right” purple for my colouring might be that I like violet but not purple?
Remember that violet hair dye? Looked fabulous. As soon as I started adding pink to transition towards rose gold, the purple hair made me look bad. Pinky purple hair brings out my undereye circles and the redness in my skin. The same goes for clothing – I tried to add lilac to my colour palette this year and some things looked good and some looked awful. Just today I said to my friend Samantha @couturious that I avoid buying purple fabric because I’m never quite sure if it will look good or not.
But guess what? The violet colour palette contains every shade of purple I’ve ever loved on myself. Turns out I like violet but not purple!?!
On the right, the Ultraviolet dye that gives me the cool periwinkle blue tone purple that I prefer.
What is truly shocking to me is that I’ve been fascinated by colour for so long but didn’t have the words to perceive a specific category. It is exactly the way I understand my gender: for most of my life I didn’t have the term non-binary, so I saw myself as a woman. When non-binary became a category I understood, it fit me much more perfectly than woman ever did. Will the same be true with violet and purple? Can I train my eye to distinguish the two, and finally predict what shades will look good on me?
I’d love to know what you think! Do you distinguish between purple and violet, or like me, did you always think they were synonyms? If you speak another language, how does your language label these colours? Do you have preference between the two, or do you love/hate both in your clothing? Let’s chat!
Crafting A Rainbow 
That was a very interesting explanation of how the brain sees purple. I think I use the two terms interchangeably (I am in the US). And I am definitely a red violet/magenta lover!
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I wish some historian could explain how we lost the category violet in north america! I rather picture early colonizers being too busy to differentiate, but that’s surely a fantasy!
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This is so interesting! I too like violet but NOT purple. I order fabric online so it is often difficult to tell the difference and I have quit with purple/violet altogether despite liking a cool violet/gray/blue…I also use both words without thinking about the difference.
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Team Violet! I went through 15 fabric websites yesterday and search for violet fabric, and found almost nothing.
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That’s a very interesting text and food for thought. I’m from Germany, brought up in the west and north, now living in the west again. We use “lila”, which I would translate to purple. The word “violett” also exists, but is rarely used in everyday language. If so it rather is a synonym to lila than signaling a different colour. This might be different in other regions since there are quite some differences with other words too.
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That is so interesting! My French friend pointed out that some regions use Violette as purple, and other say Mauve as purple… interesting that you’ve got Lila (like English lilac?) in the mix.
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Not only is there no purple, but no define colors exist. It’s a spectrum that linguists put arbitrary names on. If you really want your mind blown listen to this episode of Radio Lab https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/211213-sky-isnt-blue
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SCIENCE IS COOL! Thanks for the link!
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Purple does exist, but we perceive the light that enters our eyes, which interpret the wavelength as purple. The light “hits” the purple flower, but all the other color waves returns to our eyes, and that’s how our brain sees. Of course, this takes “cooperation” of the brain through cones.
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Kay and Berlin’s 1969 ‘Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution’ was a foundational text in the cognitive linguistics that I drew on in my (1990) philosophy PhD (‘Eros and Rationality’). Wherever you sit on the ‘universal vs culturally specific’ debate in linguistics, the purplish colours are the most relative to culture (black/dark, white/light and red are the least).
On a personal level, with my dark hair and Mediterranean olive skin, with yellowish green undertones, the blue end of the purple spectrum doesn’t suit me at all. My wardrobe is full of burgundies and marrones.
See ‘Color Categories Are Culturally Diverse in Cognition as Well as in Language’ for a summary of the debate.
https://www.sapiens.org/language/color-perception/
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YAAAAAY! I was hoping someone would drop some academic insight on me, and this is so fascinating. I’ve always been fascinated that cultures seem to develop colour words in a specific order… but somehow (ok, white supremacy) it never occurred to me that I was mis-perceiving colours due to a constrained vocabulary. Your PhD sounds so interesting! How did you settle on a topic?
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I have been thinking about it. It was a long time ago. I started it in 1983, the year after my daughter was born. I got interested in how scientific theories change in early high school. This gradually morfed into an interest in human reasoning and decision-making in general, drawing on emerging feminist philosophy of science, cognitive science and philosophers of science like Kuhn and Lakatos.
Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutation (philosophy of science), and Lakoff’s Where does Mathematics Come From (cognitive linguistics), converge on creativity and discovery in mathematical reasoning. I find it interesting that so many women sewing and fitting nerds have some sort of maths background/discipline/profession.
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Whatever you call them, I love them all. But some look so much better near my face! (I’m looking at you, lilac…)
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DO you find you can predict which colours or violet or purple will suit, or are you shopping at random like me?
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I am so glad to read this. As someone in the UK, I have been very confused by descriptions of fabric and clothes being Purple, when my eyes are saying Violet. It’s the same with Grey. So many web sites, etc. say Grey and my eyes are seeing Taupe and Mink and shades with brown in them. Do other countries not distinguish between them?
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Hi Gillian, I live in England and learned the colour names from my set of crayons from Crayola as a child. I remember they had different shades for violet and purple. I’d be interested to know what the colour names of the rainbow colours are in Canada. Is violet included or not?
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I find it interesting that what you list as violet I call purple, and what you list as purple I call violet. I’m guessing it’s a learned thing. The center square of your violet is what I would call and exemplar of purple. Regardless, I love purple, always has been my favorite color. Thanks for the explanation.
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My first thought was to ask the color scientists at RIT in Rochester NY USA. I can say “purple” better than “violet” so every thing is purple for me. Interesting article
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Fascinating! I too am from Germany, where Lila covers all ground, so I had applied that to English purple. Now violet seems so wrong! I think, similarly to Elisabeth and Sewbuttonsblog, violet for me means closer to red (aren’t violets this pink purple?), while purple covers more ground. Of course, linguistically, purple comes from the pigment, and that does have a strong red undercurrent. In German, it is therefore called “purpurrot”, i.e. we call a certain shade of red purple (the one associated with royalty, who had the money to buy this super expensive dye).
When it comes to perception, I can actually fairly easily identify the shades of purple that suit my colouring: they’re all between lavender, mauve and plum, so the blue end. Those pinker colours (“purple”) that suit me get sorted into pink and berry tones.
But on the scientific or psychological side, all colours are simply cultural categories with very little meaning on colour as a wavelength. Do you know all those discussions in ancient philology about why Homer called the sky and the sea “red” (or at least, the same colour he uses for wine and blood). Another example: Spanish speakers, even children, will absolutely insist that Celeste and Azul are different colours – while no German (or English?) speaker sees any need to differentiate categorically between light and dark blue!
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I grew up calling them all purple, but I always preferred my purple i with more blue than red, when all this time I just like violet!
Cool post, & now I know the correct wording (you made my little nerd heart happy)
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As a Brit, my first thought is what do you call the seventh colour in the rainbow then? All the mnemonics I learnt for the rainbow as a child ended in V, rather than P! I guess I’d think of a true purple as the deep regal/papal purple colour, whereas to me, violet is more grey-blue somehow – more lavender and less iris. So, yes, pretty much as you described! So interesting. Thank you
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