Here’s a cool article about why blue is such a rare color in nature. Basically, it boils down to how and why color is perceived. An object looks blue because that object is absorbing the red part of the visible spectrum. Red (and colors closer to it on the spectrum) has longer wavelengths compared to blue (and the colors closer to it on the spectrum), and thus is “low energy” compared to the other colors. For an object to appear blue, it must have molecules that can absorb very small amounts of energy. These types of molecules are difficult for plants to produce, and in animals, blue usually arises out of some sort of physical property of the animal that manipulates layers of light to produce only blue (like some butterfly wings or bird feathers).

The most interesting part of the article for me, though, was the discussion of how the word for blue was something that came much later in most languages compared to the words for, say, black, yellow, or red. It reminded me of a conversation we had in…I want to say Emotional Psychology class?…where we were talking about certain languages that didn’t/don’t have a different name for the colors blue and green – they are considered the same color, so they are named the same. I want to say Korean is one of these languages, but I could be wrong.

Anyway. Thought that was cool.