February 17, 2026
Skittles vs Science: Color cage match
Rendering the Visible Spectrum
Internet Meltdown Over Rainbows: Are We All Seeing Them Wrong?
TLDR: A researcher tries to fix those wrong-looking online rainbows with a physics-based render, and the comments ignite. Purists demand pro color standards, others argue to plot by frequency, tetrachromacy gets name-dropped, and a “Vibe Spectrum” meme breaks out—proof that color is science, art, and drama all at once.
An earnest quest to draw a “real” rainbow blew up into a full-on color war. The piece calls out internet spectra for being fake-looking—all harsh bands, wrong brightness, and squeezed blues—and tries a more accurate, physics-first render on a computer. But the comment section? Instant chaos. The color police stormed in: one purist demanded a proper “color appearance model” (think the industry’s ruler for how colors actually look to humans), name-dropping CIECAM02 and implying anything else is amateur hour. Meanwhile, the frequency gang declared plotting by wavelength “cramps the blue” and compared it to “a piano with the high notes on the left.”
Then came the gamma guardians, relieved the author remembered brightness isn’t linear, while others asked if the whole thing accounts for tetrachromacy—people with a fourth cone in their eyes—before dropping the spicy line that the rest of us might be “visually impaired.” And because the internet never misses a meme, one reader misread the title as “Rendering the Vibe Spectrum,” launching a mini-wave of jokes about lo-fi beats and chaotic auras. Verdict: a simple rainbow turned into a referendum on science, standards, and how far to go before “good enough” becomes “good grief.”
Key Points
- •Common online images of the visible spectrum are often inaccurate, showing sharp bands, wrong hue ranges, and incorrect brightness distribution.
- •The author identifies a few more accurate spectrum images (notably those on gray backgrounds with rulers and one on Wikipedia’s color page), but most lack methodological details.
- •A naive wavelength-to-RGB conversion is insufficient because color perception involves complex physics, biology, and psychology.
- •Color is linked to a spectral power distribution (SPD), which, ignoring contrast effects, uniquely determines perceived color.
- •Metamerism means different spectral distributions can produce the same perceived color, highlighting challenges in rendering spectra accurately on screens.