Of the colors we comprehend, what percentage are in light spectrum versus created in our brain?

No doubt my ignorance of the topic has made the question clunky and has confused matters. The essence of what I’m asking is that when I look at rainbows and electromagnetic color spectrums, they seem to just be a subset of the colors I see in the world. Just look at the colors of blue cars and you’ll see metallic blue, silver blue, black-blue, and so on. There seem to be way more colors of blue cars than blue colors I see in a rainbow or color spectrum.

Metallic “colors” open up yet another kettle of wax. When you look at a “metallic blue” car, what you’re seeing that enables you to distinguish it from a “blue” car is reflections of the environment in the car. But if you take a picture of that car, and look at the value of any pixel in it, you could make a car that was all that color and which wouldn’t look “metallic” at all.

There is a whole area of study on what makes objects look metallic, glossy, matte, etc. It’s pretty complex.

The invention of blue

I’m not going to watch that whole video right now, but it appears to be the “Greeks didn’t have blue” thing which is a quite tortured interpretation of a few specific antiquaries.

All people who have normal color vision can see the same physical wavelengths. While it goes without saying that the same wavelength on the spectrum will have different names in different languages, it’s less obvious that different languages may use a different number of color names to cover the same span of wavelengths. For instance, indigo might be considered the neglected stepchild of English color nomenclature, since many people simply consider it to be a purplish kind of blue. Moreover, I’m convinced it’s possible even for different dialects of the same language to use different color names. For instance, I’m still scratching my head over a P.G. Wodehouse story that alludes to a “lemon coloured” cat. Never in my life have I seen a cat whose coloring was even remotely like a lemon. Like an orange, maybe, if the author was thinking of a marmalade tabby–Were oranges (the fruit) called lemons in the early 20th century and hence considered to be lemon colored? Or in those days did lemons look more like oranges?

Ignoring aspects like sheen and fluorescence, the physical color of an object is simply the (inverse of) its absorption spectrum. That “color” can be considered to be a point in an Hilbert space of huge dimensionality.

Here is the absorption spectrum of the purple ion Mn VII. And Here are spectra associated with the blue ion Mn V. In the first image, the chemical absorbs most of the green light, so we see purple. (The 2nd peak on the left is an absorption of ultra-violet so irrelevant to the chemical’s color as perceived by humans.) In the second image, yellow-green, yellow and red are absorbed so blue is perceived.

TL;DR - these diagrams, the true physical colors, have no relationship to the CIE diagram. An alien machine would have no idea that purple was the “special color” that completes our color wheel unless it studied the cones in human retina.

My favorite example of color terminology is pink. In English, we have blue and we have light blue, green and light green, purple and light purple, and so on. We can tell the difference between blue and light blue, but we don’t consider the difference significant enough for a different name: Most people would say that light blue is just a shade of blue.

But then there’s red. Nobody ever refers to “light red” in English. We can see that color just fine, but we call it “pink” instead. And even though, in a real sense, pink really is just a shade of red, nobody ever refers to it that way.

Well, in a similar way, other cultures might be able to distinguish orange, but just call it a shade of red (an echo of this is seen in modern hair-color terminology, where orange hair is called “red”). Or they might be able to distinguish red, but just call it a shade of “dark”. Or they might go the other way and have more terms than us, like Russian that has two different words for “blue” and “cerulean”.

Some (primitive?) cultures make do with just three color names — these are always light/white, dark/black and red. For cultures with four color names, the fourth is almost always green.

Although Thai has several color names (including ‘color of pig’s blood’, ‘color of mangosteen rind’ and ‘color of cigarette smoke’ for three shades of brown) one sees vestiges of an old 4-color system. Any hair color besides jet-black is called ‘red’! Dark skin and obviously-blue objects are sometimes called ‘green’! And, despite that there is a well-known word meaning ‘transparent’, many rural Thais refer to transparent objects as ‘white.’ :smack:

The OP title is in some sense like asking what percentage of numbers between 3 and 7 are fractions. Even if you define the terms carefully, there is no meaningful answer as a percentage, unless we go to ridiculous lengths and define the granularity of human color vision to a degree I doubt the current state of knowledge allows.

The color got the name “pink” only in the 17th century, because it was the color of a popular little flower called the pink. Cute serrated petals-- I suspect that’s also where “pinking shears” comes from. Also, orange, the word for the fruit, enters English via Persian and Arabic via French, long before the 16th? century when we start using the fruit name for that color.

Use your color picker to make pink and you will find that what most of us consider pink is not equivalent to light red. Red centers on 0° on most HSB wheels, but to get pink, you have to go down by 60° or so, which makes pink more of a light magenta than a light red.

Other way around: Pinking is cutting decorative edges into something, and so the flower got named “pink” because of its shape.

Exactly right - and before the name ‘pink’ was associated with a range of colours that include light reds and light magenta, people did indeed call the colours things like ‘light red’ and ‘white flushed with red’

Chronos is right on the sequence of naming:
‘Pinked’ = frilled at the edges
a type of flower that is frilled at the edges was therefore named ‘pink’
It happened to be light magenta or light red in colour
The colour was named pink