Light is made up of waves (or particles, but that’s another story) of energy, and each color is our optic system’s interpretation of the frequencies of this modulated energy. The color we see is a result of the particular wavelengths that are reflected back to our eyes from an object that the energy is bouncing off from.

If we see an object that appears blue, for example, it means that the object absorbed all of the visible light frequencies except blue, and reflected the cooler, blue frequencies back for our eyes to image. Strange and wonderful, huh?

The visible light is a narrow bandwidth, or portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (also another story). The visible light bandwidth of the spectrum ranges from dark red at 700 nanometers to violet at 400 nanometers. One nanometer is equal to one-billionth (1/1,000,000,000) of a meter. I am 1.86 meters tall. So how many nanometers is that?