A user on “Tik Tok” stunned followers with an optical illusion that reveals a color that “cannot be seen on the screen”.
Kate Bacon shared a video clip on her account on “Tik Tok”, telling her 1.4 million followers: “I’m going to show you a color you may not have seen before, it’s called true cyan, and most TVs and screens are not able to reproduce this color.”
@kbacon You’ve probably never seen this color before… #womeninstem #voiceacting #science
The true “cyan blue” color can be seen by looking at a small white dot in the middle of the image for about 30 seconds.
The white dot is surrounded by a large red circle and a blue background. Once the 30 seconds are up, close your eyes tightly, then open them again and “you’ll see a glowing ball and this is the true color of cyan,” says Bacon.
In fact, most monitors are unable to reproduce cyan in its purest form, and this is because most of them use red, green, and blue pixels, known as the RGB color model, to create diverse combinations.
So while you might not be able to see cyan at its best on screen, you’ve certainly seen it before in the real world.
On TikTok, users described the “true heavenly” color as “beautiful” and that it became their “new favorite color” after seeing it thanks to the optical illusion.
One expert explains that seeing the color “true cyan” is due to a phenomenon known as “afterimage”, an image that continues to appear in the eye after a period of exposure to the original image. This is due to the stimulation of cone color cells.
And if you stare at a color for some time, the cones that respond to that color become heat-resistant for a short period of time until the other cones are stimulated. This is the principle that drives the afterimage.
Cone cells are located in the retina and each of the three types responds to different wavelengths of light, so focusing on one color will further stimulate these cells and desensitize them.
And when you eventually change the focus to something other than one color, the less sensitive cones show the “inversion” of the original color.