Violet (color)

Violet, also known as purple in everyday language, is a color stimulus and spectral color that ranges from the short-wave end of visible light, the boundary to ultraviolet (about 380 nm), to about 425 nm or 430 nm, the boundary to the hue indigo.

Light with this property can also be remitted as a body color. In normal language the color names violet and purple are used overlapping for hues between red and blue, but violet is the "pure" short-wave color stimulus, while purple often describes a refracted color in red-blue. The complementary color according to subtractive color mixing is yellow, according to additive color mixing it is green (although there the exact mixture of the respective primary red and blue hue (secondary color) is rather called magenta; violet is thus a tertiary color resulting from magenta and blue and is complementary to yellow-green).

Hues in the violet range: problems of differentiation

There are several words for the purple hues, which differ somewhat in meaning.

• The color purple borders on purple in some older color models.
• Purple is either synonymous with violet or it denotes a broken, lighter violet, so in this case it is not a pure hue and can be achieved by subtractive color mixing with violet and white. Colloquially, however, purple is often used for the hue violet. The lighter, pastel color variant is also called lilac or fliederfarben.
• Magenta lies between violet and red, so can be understood as a purple or blue-tinged red, and as a complementary color to green.
• The fashion color pink is understood in German as a bright, whitish (pastel-toned) magenta, or a strong bluish pink (the German translation of the English pink is 'rosa').

Different color models (color wheel) make varying use of these color names, the examples show some color names defined for website design.

Despite the very different impression of violet hues, the use of words for this colour range in everyday life is inconsistent and sometimes still controversial. Empirical studies have shown that dictionary definitions and official speech patterns are not always consistent with common usage, and that violet and purple, for example, are often used as synonyms in practice.

On the use of purple as a color word

In the past, purple things were often classified as blue or red depending on the predominant color impression.

The word purple is often used in primers as the first color name, because the known letters are limited at the beginning. Thus, this blue-red hue becomes familiar to children and is consolidated as a written color term.

There is a report by Lina Panitz about the officially protected colour mark Milka-Lila of the chocolate products of the Kraft group, which has its own Pantone number.