Impossible color

Impossible colors are colors that do not appear in ordinary visual functioning. Different color theories suggest different hypothetical colors that humans are incapable of perceiving for one reason or another, and fictional colors are routinely created in popular culture. While some such colors have no basis in reality, phenomena such as cone cell fatigue enable colors to be perceived in certain circumstances that would not be otherwise.

Opponent process

The color opponent process is a color theory that states that the human visual system interprets information about color by processing signals from cone and rod cells in an antagonistic manner. The three types of cone cells have some overlap in the wavelengths of light to which they respond, so it is more efficient for the visual system to record differences between the responses of cones, rather than each type of cone's individual response. The opponent color theory suggests that there are three opponent channels:

• Red versus green
• Blue versus yellow
• Black versus white (this is achromatic and detects light–dark variation or luminance)

Responses to one color of an opponent channel are antagonistic to those of the other color, and signals output from a place on the retina can contain one or the other but not both, for each opponent pair.

Imaginary colors

A fictitious color or imaginary color is a point in a color space that corresponds to combinations of cone cell responses in one eye that cannot be produced by the eye in normal circumstances seeing any possible light spectrum. No physical object, perceived by the normal process of vision, can have an imaginary color.

The spectral sensitivity curve of medium-wavelength (M) cone cells overlaps those of short-wavelength (S) and long-wavelength (L) cone cells. Light of any wavelength that interacts with M cones also interacts with S or L cones, or both, to some extent. Therefore, no wavelength and no spectral power distribution excites only the M cones.

A physically realizable stimulus can, unlike the case with the M cones, excite only the L or only the S cones. This can be done using bright lights whose wavelength lies at the very extremes of the visible spectrum. A lightsource that emits light with a wavelength of around 800 nm will exclusively excite the L cones. A lightsource that emits light with a wavelength of around 360 nm will exclusively excite the S cones. As one of the extremes is approached, the signal becomes purer and purer.

Olo

If M cones were excited alone, an imaginary color greener than any physically possible green would be perceived. Such a "hyper-green" falls, on the CIE 1931 xy chromaticity diagram and according to CIE 2006 LMS, on the xy coordinates (1.3267164, -0.3267164) (below and to the right of the visible gamut on the diagram). In April 2025, a research group reported achieving exactly this, by using an imaging system to scan the retina and a steerable laser source to illuminate M cones exclusively. The color perceived by experimental subjects matched the predicted sensation, describing the color as a blue-green of unprecedented saturation. It was named "olo", after its coordinates (0, 1, 0) in LMS color space. However, there is some disagreement as to whether olo is really a new color. Approximations to olo may be seen by the opponent-fatigue process, as demonstrated by other hypersaturated colors such as hyperbolic orange, described under "Chimerical Colors" below.

Imaginary colors in color spaces

Although they cannot be seen in normal vision, imaginary colors are often found in the mathematical descriptions that define color spaces.

Any additive mixture of two real colors is also a real color. When colors are displayed in the CIE 1931 XYZ color space, additive mixture results in color along the line between the colors being mixed. By mixing any three colors, one can therefore create any color contained in the triangle they describe – this is called the gamut formed by those three colors, which are called primary colors. Any colors outside of this triangle cannot be obtained by mixing the chosen primaries.

When defining primaries, the goal is often to leave as many real colors in gamut as possible. Since the region of real colors is not a triangle (see illustration), it is not possible to pick three real colors that span the whole region. The gamut can be increased by selecting more than three real primary colors, but since the region of real colors is bounded by a smooth curve, there will always be some colors near its edges that are left out. For this reason, primary colors are often chosen that are outside of the region of real colors – that is, imaginary or fictitious primary colors – in order to capture the greatest area of real colors.

In computer and television screen color displays, the corners of the gamut triangle are defined by commercially available phosphors chosen to be as near as possible to pure red, green, and blue, within the area of real colors. Because of this, these displays inevitably exhibit colors nearest to real colors lying within its gamut triangle, rather than exact matches to real colors that plot outside of it. The specific gamuts available to commercial display devices vary by manufacturer and model and are often defined as part of international standards – for example, the gamut of chromaticities defined by sRGB color space was developed into a standard (IEC 61966-2-1:1999 ) by the International Electrotechnical Commission.

Chimerical colors

A chimerical color is an imaginary color that can be seen temporarily by looking steadily at a strong color until some of the cone cells become fatigued, temporarily changing their color sensitivities, and then looking at a markedly different color. The direct trichromatic description of vision cannot explain these colors, which can involve saturation signals outside the physical gamut imposed by the trichromatic model. Opponent process color theories, which treat intensity and chroma as separate visual signals, provide a biophysical explanation of these chimerical colors. For example, staring at a saturated primary-color field and then looking at a white object results in an opposing shift in hue, causing an afterimage of the complementary color. Exploration of the color space outside the range of "real colors" by this means has been regarded as a major corroborating evidence for the opponent-process theory of color vision, but chimerical colors can also be explained without it. Chimerical colors can be seen while seeing with one eye or with both eyes, and are not observed to reproduce simultaneously qualities of opposing colors (e.g. "yellowish blue"). Chimerical colors include:

Stygian colors

These are simultaneously dark and impossibly saturated. For example, to see "stygian blue": staring at bright yellow causes a dark blue afterimage, then on looking at black, the blue is seen as blue against the black, also as dark as the black. The color is not possible to achieve through normal vision, because the lack of incident light (in the black) prevents saturation of the blue/yellow chromatic signal (the blue appearance).

Self-luminous colors

These mimic the effect of glowing material, even when viewed on a medium such as paper, which can only reflect and not emit its own light. For example, to see "self-luminous red": staring at green causes a red afterimage, then on looking at white, the red is seen against the white and may seem to be brighter than the white.

Hyperbolic colors

These are impossibly highly saturated. For example, to see "hyperbolic orange": staring at bright cyan causes an orange afterimage, then on looking at orange, the resulting orange afterimage seen against the orange background may cause an orange color purer than the purest orange color that can be made by any normally seen light.

Colors outside physical color space

According to the opponent-process theory, under normal circumstances, there is no hue that could be described as a mixture of opponent hues; that is, as a hue looking "redgreen" or "yellowblue".

In 1983, Hewitt D. Crane and Thomas P. Piantanida performed tests using an eye-tracker device that had a field of a vertical red stripe adjacent to a vertical green stripe, or several narrow alternating red and green stripes (or in some cases, yellow and blue instead). The device could track involuntary movements of one eye (there was a patch over the other eye) and adjust mirrors so the image would follow the eye and the boundaries of the stripes were always on the same places on the eye's retina; the field outside the stripes was blanked with occluders. Under such conditions, the edges between the stripes seemed to disappear (perhaps due to edge-detecting neurons becoming fatigued) and the colors flowed into each other in the brain's visual cortex, overriding the opponency mechanisms and producing not the color expected from mixing paints or from mixing lights on a screen, but new colors entirely, which are not in the CIE 1931 color space, either in its real part or in its imaginary parts. For red-and-green, some saw an even field of the new color; some saw a regular pattern of just-visible green dots and red dots; some saw islands of one color on a background of the other color. Some of the volunteers for the experiment reported that afterward, they could still imagine the new colors for a period of time.