I can't show you how pink this pink is.

What people said

Macha · 2026-06 · Reference

There's a few dyes (mostly pinks and cyans) that are outside sRGB space (though once you apply them to a material, that combination of material and dye might be fine), Tom Scott had a video a few years ago, though I don't know if that particular dye/seller is still going: [VIDEO] There's also Vantablack and similar ultra-black dyes which are a somewhat adjacent phenomena but in the same category of "colors your screen can't display". The most black a pixel can be is "off" (and that's only achievable if the display is on if your screen is an OLED), and the back coating of your screen is probably not as black as those dyes.

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Intralexical · 2026-03 · Reference

> It is sometimes associated with our inability to think of new colors, but I think this is a completely different problem. As an aside, thinking of a new color is relatively easy. You can sorta actually see new colors just by making a really good pigment[0], or shooting cone cells with lasers[1]. But there's also the possibility of having a new photoreceptor . In which case, you don't just gain 1 new color. You gain 3 new secondary colors, plus an entire new type of 4 "tertiary colors", each of which is as visually distinct as cyan, magenta, and yellow are. And the colorspace itself becomes a 4-dimensional volume, with every existing color able to blend into smooth graduations of the new cone cell signal. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

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evanb · 2021-08 · Reference

Relevant: "I can't show you how pink this pink is." by Tom Scott [VIDEO] Also relevant, his piece on "The Library of Rare Colors" [LINK]

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