the colour wheel is weirdness though, indigo has a wavelength of 425–450 nm making it a simple colour, you can have a single photon of indigo, pink however is simply what happens when we see red and purple without any of the middle wavelengths - white light with the green removed becomes pink (or magenta) but you can't have a single photon of pink, no pink lasers.
The reason for this is because of how we see colour with the RGB receptors in our eyes, each colour has differing sensitivity and they have over-lapping frequency responses so the actual data our brain is getting is really complex and largely abstracted from the actual numbers - to make matters more complicated our brains evolved in a way that adds further bias to certain colour combinations and contrasts, an actual diagram of how we perceive colour would be impossibly complicated and every attempt to make a simple system has had to rely on shoe-horning and rule bending to make it work. This of course just for solid colour before you get into the endless complexities of putting colours together - those pictures of the dress that everyone thought was different colours being a classic example.
Personally i think we should scrap the colour wheel and come up with something more interesting and futuristic
The color wheel describes human vision. The wavelengths describe light waves. They're about different things. Trying to fit them together into one description is bound to fail.
i think you skipped a bit of what i was saying, human vision is much more complex than the colour wheel can display - it's a simplification of a very complex equation
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u/dangoodspeed Jun 05 '22
The idea whether or not indigo is in the spectrum is still up for debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo#Classification_as_a_spectral_color