Stare at the fatigue template for about a minute, then glance at the target field, and you might be able to see unique colors.
It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.
The Fictional Colour is a color described in a work of fiction that doesn't exist in Real Life, and would be impossible to create or obtain.
The Fictional Colour is usually found in Speculative Fiction. It may indicate the presence or influence of magic, such as when a Magical Sensory Effect is in play. Sometimes it can only be seen by certain species or types of people. When not associated with magic, it's used to give some sort of descriptor to concepts that cannot be expressed by actual colors visible to the human eye, especially when it comes to energy. For example, any sort of infrared or ultraviolet vision changes things to a form we can comprehend, and works like The Incredible Hulk have caused gamma energy to be associated with green.
In any event, it is almost always confined to non-visual forms of storytelling, for obvious reasons. If we actually saw it, well, it wouldn't be fictional. Visual works may incorporate this either by just having other characters describe the colors or removing all color from the work so you can just assume that shade of grey is a color you've never seen before.
Strangely enough, attempts to describe the Fictional Color will often result in prose that is very much purple.
The Parody Sue sometimes has eyes of this color.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- The color of Vivio Takamachi's magic in the Lyrical Nanoha series is best described as "iridescent". According to the manual, it is known as "Kaiserfarbe" note and is strongly associated with the extinct Saint King bloodline.
Comic Books
- In one of the Cobweb sequences in Tomorrow Stories, Cobweb's depraved ancestor La Toile encounters and mourns an eight forgotten color of the rainbow while in the underworld. As the sequence was done in mostly prose, the color is only mentioned.
Fan Works
- Luminosity:
- Upon turning, Bella is pleasantly surprised that vampires can see ultraviolet.
- In the second book, Elspeth is quite disoriented by receiving a vampire memory that includes that color. After processing the memory, however, she finds that her normal vision now feels like it's missing something:
Elspeth (thinking): There was a missing color, not just absent in the environment but literally invisible, and I wanted it.
- In The Official Fanfiction University Of Middle-earth, urple. It's described as a combination of pink and purple in the worst possible way.
- Inspired by this fanwork was another parody, a Pokemon story called "The Official Fanfiction University of Kanto." It features "blorange," which (of course) is blue and orange combined in the same worst possible way.
- Played for Laughs in Time to Disinfect. Mari finds a box of band-aids that turn out to be such a vibrant shade of pink that she's convinced the color can't naturally exist on earth, much to her and Sunny's bemusement.
Literature
- 1408: After a cleaning lady was momentarily locked up inside room 1408, she was rendered blind and could only see "the most awful colors" that she had no name for.
- When turning into a bee in Animorphs, Marco describes a color so unbelievably intense humans can't see it, but bee eyes can. This likely refers to "bee purple", a color in the ultraviolet spectrum beyond what humans can see, but bees are able to.
- In the Book of the New Sun trilogy, there's both fuligin, a color darker than black (described as appearing to be 'a hole in the universe' and reserved for the use of Torturers note .), and argent (originally meaning "silvery"), a color brighter than white (used solely by The Emperor).
- In The Book Of Ultimate Truths by Robert Rankin, when Brother Rizla is explaining to a sceptical Cornelius and Tuppe about the amazing discoveries made by Hugo Rune, he reveals that there are actually three colours whose existence has been concealed from humanity. Apparently this is with good reason, as when Cornelius' brain tries to make sense of one of them, "a reddy yellowy bluey greenish blackish sort of white — except that it was not", his eyes start watering; Rizla tells him that the second will make him break out in hives, and the third will put him in a coma.
- Carl Sagan, in Broca's Brain, describes his own childhood efforts to imagine a new color:
Burroughs casually comments that on Mars there are two more primary colors than on Earth. I spent many long minutes with my eyes tightly closed, fiercely concentrating on a new primary color. But it would always be a murky brown or a plum.
- H. P. Lovecraft's short story "The Colour Out of Space". When heated in a spectroscope, a meteorite "displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum". A globule inside the meteorite and vegetation grown in the area where the meteor fell also display the non-spectrum colors. The Colour monster itself is made up of these colors.
- In Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Colors Of Space, the substance necessary for interstellar stardrive shows up as this, though only under a light too bright for normal humans to stand.
- Ambrose Bierce's story The Damned Thing is about some kind of monster that is of a color that people can't see.
- Nancy Kress's 1978 short story "A Delicate Shade of Kipney" has a group of colonists from Earth stranded on a planet with a greyish, nearly opaque atmosphere. Within two generations, their descendants have given the desaturated colors they see around them names like "kipney" and "tlem".
- Discworld
- The color octarine, which is the eighth colour that only wizards can see. It is described as being approximately "a sort of fluorescent yellowish-greenish-purple", which may be based on the splashes of afterimage one sees after staring into a bright light. Non-wizards can't see it directly, but can pick it out from where other colours aren't.
- There are also different colours of black, mentioned both in Death's garden in Mort and Assassins' Guild uniforms in Pyramids. Usually only visible when darkness is split by an eight sided prism in a strong magical field, you can apparently simulate them by taking something illegal and taking a long look at a starling's wing.
- Inverted with the color of infinity, which Death describes as "duck-egg blue".
- Fairest by Gail Carson Levine reveals the heroine's hair to be "htun", a colour only gnomes can see, but which humans see as merely black.
- The Cthulhu Mythos short story "The Feaster from Afar" by Joseph Payne Brennan. The description of the title monster said "...its fixed blazing eyes were of no color ever known on Earth."
- From Brazil there's children's book Flicts
, about a different color that doesn't fit anywhere. So it searches for its place, ultimately leading to a fairly distant one: "Not many will know it, but the Moon is flicts". Neil Armstrong himself agrees◊ (in a meeting with Armstrong, the author showed the color used in the book, a soil-like beige, and asked if the moon surface was like that, which the astronaut said was true).
- The Conan the Barbarian story "The Frost-Giant's Daughter". When Conan meets the title character Atali, he sees that her eyes are filled with "...clouds of colors he could not define."
- Good Omens mentions infra-black, which is apparently the color that flashes before your eyes right before you die from a fatal concussion.
- Dave Gorman, when wanting to write a novel, came up with the idea of a man named Hugh Brown who discovers a new colour. He never actually wrote it, though, due to being a Ridiculous Procrastinator, and ended up going on Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure instead.
- In the Q&A section of his live show, he explained the inherent problem with the idea; that it involved writing about something that didn't exist and couldn't be described.
- In the short story "Green Magic" by Jack Vance, a man who's devoted his life to studying black and white magic also knows something about purple magic, then finds out there's a "green magic" cycle. It's a dimension whose residents can see a multitude of colors that don't exist on earth. Two of these colors, rawn and pallow, have magic cycles of their own.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes hooloovoo, a shade of blue that is sentient. As a Shout-Out, this shade appears in Doctor Who, in the episode "The Rings of Akhaten".
- The third book describes a lair with the colors Ultra Violent, Infra Dead, Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt Hombre, and Gan Green. These colors are only mentioned in passing and have no significance other than to convey how horrendously ugly the lair is.
- In N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy, in The Broken Kingdoms, the main character is blind, but she can see magic. Since she's not normally sighted, she doesn't know the names of some colors, and makes them up. Regarding the story's Flying Dutchman god-in-human-form, Shiny, Oree calls his eyes "colors I had only heard of in poetry: fire opal. Sunset's cloak. Velvet and desire." Possibly a sort of reddish-yellow. She also makes up the words for the magic of the Eldritch Abomination Big Bad. His power is "sickly, mottled", a shifting combination of many colors as he has stolen the magic of several gods.
- The Guvnuragnaguvendrugun in The Jenkinsverse have a much wider and more precise color range than humans. Conveniently they also have chromatophores that communicate their emotions on this entire color range so while they can't describe the colors to humans, they can at least name them based on what emotion they mean.
- Most of the galaxy, however, are dichromats. So for them red is a fictional color.
- In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell faeries have access to a lot of colors most people don't, mostly conceptual ones, and the Gentleman with Thistle-Down Hair notably keeps Lady Pole's finger in a box the color of heartache.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series. The Martians discovered two colors outside the visual spectrum, the Eighth Ray (used for propulsion) and Ninth Ray (used to create the breathable Martian atmosphere).
- In The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, one of the Whangdoodle's powers is being able to turn into whatever color he wants. When asked which color is hardest to do, he says "flange," which is all of the colors of the rainbow, all at once. He finds flange surprisingly easy to do once he's no longer the last of the Whangdoodles.
- The Lightbringer Series features, among others mentioned, paryl. The magic system in this fantasy series is based on colours and paryl is invisible to most, extremely hard to draft (do magic with) and very weak, but used by Teia, who, from book two onwards, is a main character. She has to keep it secret as colours other than those of the regular spectrum are considered blasphemic. Information in book description and the author's notes in the appendix suggests that "paryl" light is how Teia sees terahertz radiation.
- At the end of John Boorman's never-produced script for Lord of the Rings, Legolas sees a rainbow and says "Look! Only seven colors. Indeed, the world is failing."
- Possibly the earliest example: in Frances Godwin's The Man in the Moone (published in 1638), the protagonist travels to the moon in a basket carried by swans and finds that the men there wear clothes of a color that does not exist on Earth, and that cannot be described save that it is "the most glorious and delightful, that can possibly be imagined".
- Frank Belknap Long's Cthulhu Mythos novel The Space Eaters. The narrator and his friend discuss Eldritch Abominations, one property of which is being of a color unknown on Earth.
- The Space Trilogy: Picking up on the color ideas from Lindsay, C. S. Lewis uses them for his eldila (angels/energy beings). They are normally invisible to humans, but under proper lighting conditions, or if the eldil is trying hard, you will see beams and auras of new colors.
- In John M. Ford's Star Trek novel, The Final Reflection, Klingons cannot see red, but can see colors like "amarklor" that are well into the ultraviolet range.
- The Stormlight Archive: Warlight, the Yin-Yang Bomb of Mana from the gods Honor and Odium, appears as an "impossible" vibrant black-blue light that could be Stygian blue.
- In Sunshine by Robin McKinley the Big Bad's eyes are some unknown, impossible color, because what color is evil?
- The Third Policeman, written by Brian O'Nolan under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. One of the bizarre things the protagonist encounters is a paint of an unknown color that drives those that see it mad.
- In This Immortal, the Vegans perceive a different range of colours than humans do, starting deeper down in the ultraviolet range and stopping before red. This results in them seeing two colours where humans see white.
- Unsong has, in addition to the conventional seven colors, the "three colors you only see in heaven", in keeping with the overall cosmology in which, roughly, the number seven represents earthly things, the number three represents heaven, and the sum, ten, represents God and completeness/perfection. A character weaving a spell in all ten colors at once is generally a sign to run away really fast.
- In Philip K. Dick's VALIS, the main character encounters a pink laser beam, but the exact shade of pink exists outside humanity's view of the light spectrum.
- In A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, the star Arcturus has a companion star, Alpain, which shines with two additional colors, ulfire and jale. Or maybe Arcturians can see ulfire and jale; hard to tell, since the hero arrives on the Arcturian planet Tormance transformed into a local humanoid.
- Isaac Asimov's "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use": The native of Venus have much, much greater colour perception than humans. This becomes a plot point, as it means no humans can read their ancient languages without a spectrograph. Particularly the operating manual for the Forgotten Superweapon mentioned in the title.
- In Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, the eccentric scientist discovered the eponymous world by way of his recently invented infra-green filter. (Yeah, Ms. Cameron kinda played fast and loose with science...) but then she's writing a fantasy about a planet too small to have any atmosphere. She discusses this in her book The Green and Burning Tree.
Live-Action TV
- In "The Eternal Shriek" from The Good Place, Michael and Tahani are discussing tablecloth colors for the party, when Michael suggests the color "pleurigloss," which is the color of "when a soldier comes home from war and sees his dog for the first time." Tahani understandably suggests blue.
- In one of Marvin Marvin episodes, Glorb is one of colors that exist in Marvin's planet.
Radio
- The first series episode "Madness is a Strange Colour" of The BBC Radio Four sitcom Nebulous features the newly discovered colour "garrow", which drives people insane. It's described as "a sort of yellowy-black, but with more of a pinky-green feel". The imaginarynote colour "battleship mauve" is also frequently mentioned.
- Over the Edge, the radio show hosted by the late Negativland member Don Joyce, once featured a show where cultural reviewer Crosley Bendix (played by Joyce) discussed the color squant at length. It's the fourth primary color, and it even has its own scent. You can hear the ''Squant'' discourse here.
Tabletop Games
- Call of Cthulhu
- The Colour Out Of Space (based on the H. P. Lovecraft story) is an Energy Being made up of colors outside the known spectrum.
- Curse of the Chthonians, adventure "The City Without A Name". The Scepter of Iram has a gem of a color not of our spectrum.
- Masks of Nyarlathotep, Shanghai section. Sir Aubrey's rocket is made of an alien metal that gleams with sickening alien colors.
- H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham: Unveiling the Legend-Haunted City, adventure "Uncle Silas's Books". If the Player Characters decide to burn the title magical books, the books will explode in flames that have colors unknown on Earth.
- Carcosa: Weird Science-Fantasy Horror Setting. The planet Carcosa has three additional colors: ulfire, jale and dolm. Ulfire is "wild and painful", jale is "dreamlike, feverish and voluptuous". Dolm has the same relationship to jale as green has to red: it's a mixture of ulfire and blue.
- GDW's Dark Conspiracy adventure Hellsgate. The extra-dimensional gate in the Temple of Kukulcan randomly glows up and down all the colors of the spectrum, and some that are not part of the spectrum.
- Dungeons & Dragons
- 2nd Edition Planescape setting boxed set, Monstrous Supplement booklet. The Spirits of the Air wear clothes with ever-shifting colors that are impossible to name.
- Dungeon magazine #28 adventure "Sleepless". Draskilion's castle has a ceremonial chamber. Unusual runes and symbols are painted on its floor, walls and ceiling in alien colors.
- GURPS Space: Space Atlas 4
- The aliens known as the Garuda can see one color in the infrared range and two in the ultraviolet range, neither of which can be seen by humans.
- The alien Kinski can see three colors in the infrared range that human beings can't.
- Polaris. The dawn's first appearance is described in the gamebook: "Light coming up from the edge of the sky, colors redder than stars, new shades that had never been seen, yellow and green and golden through the icicle walls, burning out the stars from the sky, brilliant and impossible and beautiful and alien."
- Rolemaster campaign setting Shadow World. When creatures of the Void cast spells, it creates a rainbow of impossible colors.
Video Games
- In Fallen London, along with Sunless Sea, there's a whole spectrum of them:
- First there’s Irrigo, the unremembered color, a brilliant shade of purple which causes people to forget things the longer they are exposed to it, and soaks into you like radiation after a while. The body may start growing bone over the eyesockets if the exposure is particularly severe. Of the colors, it's perhaps the most dangerous, as prolonged exposure can utterly destroy a person, leaving a wandering husk that doesn't know anything and cannot learn more. Memories will come back for lesser exposure, but something will always be forever lost. Occasionally used as Brain Bleach by the extremely traumatized, and commonly by spies who need to forget certain bits of critical data on a regular basis.
- Violant, described as the color of necessary but troublesome connections. It also semi-counters Irrigo, and anything written in Violant ink is very hard to forget. Treaties written in Violant ink tend to be the result of very desperate times, for this reason. It's also called the color of perilous understanding; people who study the Correspondence use Violant ink often not just to remember what they've learned, but to understand it. Of course, nothing stops it from making you understand things you shouldn't understand. It's the color that gets depicted the most inconsistently, either as iridescent peacock or as wine-red.
- Apocyan, the blue of memory, usually found on particularly glowy and valuable bits of Unterzee coral and occasionally its waves. Not quite as special as the rest (even its respective high-profession item, the Crooked Cross, is just colored in Apocyan because it looks pretty), and possibly the most common of the lot, but sighting it does jog your memory of things that happened years ago. Dreaming in Apocyan as part of the Fire Sermon can produce daguerreotypes (19th-century photographs) of things that you saw in the dream.
- Cosmogone, the gold of remembered sunlight. Strangely enough, it seems to encourage plentiful fungus growth. Usually found in dreams, and in cinders that have been soaking in celestial radiations for too long. It presence also attracts things from beyond the mirror, good and bad, which is why those who venture there as their job wear glasses of this color.
- Viric, the green of shallow sleep and the light from mirrors. Which turns slightly unnerving when you know most mirrors IRL have a green tinge. Still, let's just say mirrors in the Neath are dangerous, and have links with dreams. For some reason, it also seems to encourage the growth of regular, non-fungal vegetables, though this effect is noted to thoroughly spook those who witness it.
- Peligin, the color of the deepest zee, both the actual water and its monsters. Hunters who have eaten the flesh of these beasts also get Peligin eyes. It's somewhat like a washed-out version of the Stygian blue in the page image: the darkest possible blue-gray, almost black.
- And finally there's Gant, which remains when all other colors are gone. Quite hard to find, and usually bad news when you do. Gant writing can only be read in near-complete darkness, and it can be used to directly erase any other color (which makes it valuable for tattoo removal). It's more beige than one might expect, though it does have a reddish tinge to it.
- When learning about dyes in WildStar, you help a Protostar representative retrieve an order of "Plurbinum" dye, a copyrighted color developed by their Mega-Corp.
- In one of the Icecrown missions in World of Warcraft, a gnome technician gives you a pair of "infra-green" goggles so you can find their secret base on one of the citadel's spires. This might be a Shout-Out to the TV show The Green Hornet, whose car the Black Beauty has infra-green headlights (although those technically used polarized light).
Webcomics
- In Arthur, King of Time and Space both Olympians and fairies can see into the ultraviolet. The fairies have names for ultraviolet colours, which surprises Hercules.
- In Bob and George, Bass claims to see lots of new colors when his eyes are upgraded to see a wider range of EM frequencies.
Web Original
- This article in Orion's Arm actually tries to do the math.
- The Protectors of the Plot Continuum have documented a large number of impossible colors. Among the ones they've discovered are, in addition to the ones described in The Official Fanfiction University Of Middle-earth, bismange, blello, hreen, purite bledangle, rolky-mose, smood gred and wilver. Lots of them are physically painful to look at.
- Roll To Dodge: Savral features the color octarine, named after the Discworld color. Octarine acts as in indicator of eldritch magic, and the fact it is never described in terms of other colors highlights its otherness.
- SCP Foundation
- Log of Anomalous Items. 3 of the pencils in a box of 24 Crayola-brand pencils are in colors that don't exist in nature. The colors are named "moiter," "emilet" and "cankri".
- SCP-558 ("Strange Contact Lenses"). When the red contact lenses are worn and used to view infrared light, the wearer sees it as a distinctly new color that they lack the language to describe properly.
- SCP-616 ("The Vessel and the Gate"). In Interview A the survivor says that when the door opened there was light coming from outside that was a haze of "...colors, but they weren't colors...".
- SCP-712 ("The Impossible Colors"). SCP-712-a and SCP-712-b are two impossible colors outside the visible spectrum created by a complicated piece of apparatus. Viewing them can cause migraines and/or grand mal seizures.
- SCP-1569 ("Jumbo Shrimp"). The tendrils inside SCP-1569 destroyed the eyes of the human trapped within it. As the tendrils dug around in his eye sockets he reported being able to see colors he had never seen before. He was seeing through SCP-1569's eyes.
- SCP-2606 ("Verminous Vessel"). When a person under the influence of SCP-2606 made telepathic contact with an octopus, they saw vivid colors that they could not describe, presumably those that an octopus can see but humans can't.
- SCP-3004 ("Imago"). A Foundation Agent uses astral perception to see SCP-3004-1's true form. When SCP-3004-1 opens its mouth, the Agent can see colors he had never seen before inside of it.
- SCP-8900-EX is an inversion: it's the spectrum as we know it that is "unnatural", the result of a global containment breach by SCP-8900 that colorized a previously black-and-white world.
- Log of Anomalous Items
- The Website Thenewcolor.net claims to have created a new color called 'Neochrome' through a chemical process that shows up on traditional color monitors and cameras as gray noise. It is described as being neither dark and not either a blend of existing colors.
Western Animation
- The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Faith" begins with the Wattersons watching a news report about scientists discovering a new, unnamed color. Someone holds up a beaker containing a liquid with the new color, but the TV goes gray from static before we can see how it looks.
- Futurama
- There is mention of a color called Blurple.
- Fry's description of an amazing, indescribable thing he saw that day at the beginning of "I Dated A Robot":
Fry: I just saw something incredibly cool. A big floating ball that lit up with every color of the rainbow, plus some new ones that were so beautiful I fell to my knees and cried.
Amy: Was it out in front of Discount Shoe Outlet?
Fry: Yeah.
Amy: They have a college kid wear that to attract customers. - In the episode "Reincarnation", an exploding comet creates a rainbow with an extra color never seen before. However, since that particular segment was Deliberately Monochrome, that new color just looks gray to the audience.
- In the Gravity Falls episode "Weirdmageddon 2: Escape from Reality", Mabel's Sugar Bowl fantasy world includes rainbows with colors that can normally only be seen by bees and art students.
- Star vs. the Forces of Evil brings us "Pony Head Color", which is apparently very popular on Mewni.
- Winx Club: Stella is expulsed from Alfea because she mixed all sorts of potion ingredients in order to create a new shade of pink, triggering an explosion in the process.
Real Life
- As reported in Scientific American and the other wiki citing Science, through various bits of optical illusion type gimmickery, people can see and recognize a Fictional Colour - two, in fact: the color that is a blend of blue and yellow that is not green, and the color that is a blend of green and red that is not ick brown. There's also Stygian Blue, resulting from fatigue caused by staring at bright yellow then looking at something black. There are others listed on The Other Wiki's page for Impossible Colors.
- As explained on The Other Wiki, the human brain's visual centers are actually capable of perceiving a wider range of colors than the human eye can physically detect. Thus why some people on severe hallucinatory drug trips claim that they can see indescribable colors they never knew existed before. The problem of course is that these impossible colors cannot exist in a form that everyone else can "see", because they can never truly be detected by the human eye. They're difficult to describe, given that there's no frame of reference to compare them to. Nonetheless, people do comprehend them as some kind of "color", though they can't really match words to them.
- It is possible for many animals and even some humans to see ultra-violet light. In the case of humans, this typically occurs if the lens of your eye is lost or replaced; it ordinarily absorbs UV light, but those who have had their lenses removed can see a short distance into the UV spectrum. This is less exciting than it sounds in the case of humans. Because it is picked up by our ordinary rods and cones, the light appears as a washed-out violet.
- This ability was used in WW2 by American and British forces as a desirable attribute in reconnaissance troops and Intelligence analysts. It was noticed that those few people who can see further into the UV could distinguish between natural foliage and the artificial variety manufactured as camouflage cloth/strips, which could be indistinguishable to normal human eyes. Therefore a recce scout spotting un-natural greens would know he was observing a camouflaged tank or emplacements.
- Similarly, some animals have four color cones, as do some humans (see below).
- Being a combination of colors on two opposite ends of the light spectrum, the color magenta doesn't actually exist. It is what happens when your eyes detect both red and violet light, and your brain mashes them together. Another good example is brown which also does not correlate to any specific wave length.
- There are multiple alleles for the various color receptor genes in the human eye; some humans have two alleles for the same colors, and thus end up with a pair of close but not identical color receptors in their eyes. They are tetrachromats, but exactly how their vision differs from a normal person's is still being investigated — they do not see a whole new world of colors, but there is some evidence that they may be slightly better at distinguishing colors from each other.
- Turtles can see one extra color that humans cannot.
- There are a few highly light-absorbent materials such as Vantablack which are described as "blacker than black". They reflect so little light that the eye has a hard time focusing and some people get headaches. Didn't keep BMW from coating a car in it, though.
