Over the rainbow, along the spectrum
Rainbows, lines or wheels? Art, religion or science? Humans have wondered what colour is and how it works since the first rainbow appeared in the sky.
The rainbow is Nature’s most spectacular way of arranging colours. The colour spectrum shimmers through water droplets or dazzles through a cut diamond.
Rainbows appear throughout myth, religion and art. There’s the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent, and the Greek goddess Iris, messenger of the gods. In the Norse religion, the rainbow is a bridge to Valhalla. In Judeo-Christianity, the rainbow in the story of Noah’s Ark signifies the promise of God’s protection. Today, the rainbow is a potent symbol of hope in struggles against racism and discrimination.
The philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) bent the rainbow out of shape, hammering it into a line. He theorised colours along a continuum from the white of light at one end, to the black of light’s absence at the other. The first colour after white was yellow, and at the other end of the line, blue was the last before black swallowed light up. For Aristotle, yellow and blue were the true ‘primary colours’. (I like to think that Aristotle might have first thought about colour, light and dark as he learned from his teacher Plato, who used the allegory of prisoners in a dark cave to explore reality and illusion. Colour involves both!)
Isaac Newton (1643-1727 CE) placed seven colours around a wheel. He was the first to use the word ‘spectrum’, and theorised different colours as light moving at different speeds: violet moving most slowly, red moving fastest. He placed the two side by side, forming one continuous circle. White and black are absent from Newton’s colour wheel, since every colour present is a component of light.
Newton’s colour wheel depicted the modern ‘primary colours’ opposite complementary colours. Red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. Each colour makes its opponent ‘pop’. Contrast is all. Harmonies abound. Today, artists and designers use a range of relationships between colours on Newton’s wheel to create harmonious colour schemes. Three colours sitting alongside look lovely - that’s called an analogous scheme. A triadic scheme includes three colours at equidistant points on the wheel. There are many more combinations.
From neat stacks of pristine knitwear to the box of pastels in the art shop, from multi-coloured stained glass in a cathedral to a plate of French macarons: colours arranged in harmony are hard to resist.
Personal styling and colour analysis uses all these principles to discover the shades that harmonise with your personal colouring. Choosing the right colours evens your complexion, making it glow. The wrong colours for you create shadows, draining natural radiance away. Once you have ‘your’ palette of best colours, you can walk past racks of clothes knowing they won’t do anything for you - and on to the garments that do.
There are rich rewards at the rainbow’s end.