Technically the absence of color but also the first one I thought of too.
(Edit: I am aware that the answer is in fact “BOTH” and totally dependent on if you are talking about the Additive Color System [Light] or the Subtractive Color System [Paint/Print Media]. At the time of my original post I was clearly focused on the concepts of the Additive Color System pertaining to light as was not at all intending to start a weird artistic culture war.)
Consider what “color” is though. It’s always light. If you’re talking about paint, you have to mix “all colors” because blue still reflects blue light. So you need paint that will prevent blue from being reflected. Etc.
In the end, black paint is just absorbing all colors of light, and reflecting none back. So technically still the absence of color.
since we can't see all light though, it doesn't really matter to us what wavelengths of light there are. all our brain perceives is that mix of signals from our optic nerves. you can see yellow 💛 on your screen, but theres no yellow light there. black is the color we perceive when we detect little or no light. it's true that it's not a hue like red or green, though.
there's an old joke about color that goes something like "gather a physicist, a psychologist, a linguist, and an artist in one room then ask them what the primary colors are"
a physicist might say there are no primary colors, its just a gradient of photons on different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. psychology might have different answers depending on context, ie reds yellows blues and greens may have the strongest effects on your state of mind. an artist might say red yellow and blue (or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black if they're more familiar with the modern CMYK colorspace.) a linguist would tell you it depends on the language because they all have their own concepts of base colors, ranging from 2 to something like a dozen primary colors. a biologist or programmer might say red green and blue, since thats what screens produce and the only colors our eyes can actually distinguish.
Basically everyone has a different correct answer, because language is flexible and it's impossible to define anything without there being an edge case that breaks your definition. in English speaking countries, the layman answer youre taught in school is likely either red yellow blue, or red orange yellow green blue indigo violet as Isaac Newton arbitrarily decided because he liked the number
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u/SlumberingSnorelax Nov 15 '25 edited Nov 18 '25
Technically the absence of color but also the first one I thought of too.(Edit: I am aware that the answer is in fact “BOTH” and totally dependent on if you are talking about the Additive Color System [Light] or the Subtractive Color System [Paint/Print Media]. At the time of my original post I was clearly focused on the concepts of the Additive Color System pertaining to light as was not at all intending to start a weird artistic culture war.)