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in another sense, the colors of rainbows. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. In between each of these colors is almost every other color we can detect . . . “almost” being the operative word.
    The exception? Magenta. Go find a picture of a rainbow and you’ll notice that magenta (often called pink), just isn’t there. But, color-blindness aside, we can clearly see it. What’s going on here?
    First, let’s talk about rainbows. Light comes in all sorts of wavelengths, and we humans can detect light in many of those wavelengths. (We can’t see all of them—infrared and ultraviolet are two of the more commonly known invisible ones, but radio waves, x-rays, and gamma rays are also examples.) The light itself doesn’t actually have a color—as Isaac Newton observed, “The rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color.” Our brains just associate different wavelengths with different colors. The range of 380 nanometers to about 450 nanometers are seen as various shades of violet, for example. Magenta, though, doesn’t have an associated wavelength.
    Instead, our brain just kind of makes it up when other information comes in.
    Our eyes have photoreceptor cells called rods and cones. Rods detect the presence and amount of light, even if there are only small amounts, but cannot help us determine the color of things. Cones, which require more light before they turn on, help us figure out the colors. (That’s why when it’s dark, we often can’t tell what color things are.) Humans typically have three types of cones: red, blue, and green. Everything the cones detect, therefore, is actually just one of those three colors, and our brains fill in the gaps so we can “see” the other colors of the rainbow. When a yellow wavelength comes in, for example, the red and green cones are triggered. Our brains interpret that as “yellow,” and bananas, school buses, and lemons are better off for it. This makes sense . . . just ask Roy G. Biv. If you look between red and green, you’ll see yellow is situated right in there.
    Magenta occurs when the red and blue cones are stimulated. That’s a problem if you look at the rainbow, because there’s no “between” red and blue, as the ends of the spectrum don’t connect with each other. The brain needs to do something with that information, and magenta seems like a pretty good solution, although for no obvious reason. After all, as Scientific American said (echoing Newton’s observation), color “is all in your head [. . .]. It is a sensation that arises in your brain.” If we’re going to make up the colors anyway, there’s no reason to limit ourselves to the stuff found in the visible spectrum—and the result is pink.
    BONUS FACT
    As noted earlier, when our eyes detect yellow wavelengths, that light is captured by the red and green cones and translated into what we think of as yellow. Most computer monitors (and TV and smartphone screens, for that matter) take advantage of this conversion process and skip the first step—there’s no yellow wavelengths being used whatsoever. (That’s also true for cyan, brown, and of course, magenta.) All the colors the monitors show are actually just a mix of red, blue, and green light. If you could magnify your screen a lot, you’d see a series of red, blue, and green dots, and that’s it—there are only three colors there.

THE CRAYON MAN’S SECRET
THE SHOCKING TRUTH BEHIND THE MAN OF MANY COLORS
    In 1903, the husband and wife team of Edwin and Alice Binney created the first wax crayon. Mr. Binney and his cousin, C. Harold Smith, owned a colorant company called the Binney and Smith Company, which, on July 10 of that year, introduced the couple’s new product—Crayola crayons. In the