Sorry girls, but the colour pink doesn't exist and is just a pigment of our imagination



It's the favourite of little girls the world over, associated with femininity, springtime and romance.



Yet scientists this have announced that the colour pink does not actually exist.

Well it does, but only in our minds.

The trouble lies in the fact pink is a combination of red and violet, two colours, which - if you look at a rainbow - are on the opposite sides of the spectrum.



Scroll down for video

All in our minds? Scientists have been arguing over whether the colour pink actually exists

So it can’t exist in nature without bending the colours of the rainbow to allow red and violet to commingle, a theoretical impossibility.

As colour is a construct of our eyes and brains, w hen you look at a pink object you are not actually seeing pink wavelengths of light.



It only appears pink because certain wavelengths of light are reflected while others are absorbed, quenched, by the pigments.



Therefore Pink is a reflective colour, not a transmissive colour - you can see it because the brain translates light bouncing off objects.



Robert Krulwich presenter of the scientific radio show Radiolab pointed out the conundrum this week describing it as a 'made-up colour'.

Spectrum: Pink is a combination of red and violet, two colors, which, if you look at a rainbow, are on the opposite sides of the rainbow

However Jill Morton, professor at the University of Hawaii who has consulted for Xerox, Kodak and others to whom colour matters disagrees.



She told popsci.com: 'Of course pink is a colour. But with that said, pink is indeed not part of the light spectrum. It’s an extra-spectral coluor, and it has to be mixed to generate it.

'If you take a tube of red paint and add white to it, you’ll get pink. If you work with watercolours, take red paint and add a lot of water to it and put it on watercolour paper, that would be pink.