Concept
The color magenta has notable tints and shades. These various colors are shown below. Magenta is a color made up of equal parts of red and blue light. This would be the precise definition of the color as defined for computer display (the color #FF00FF shown in the color swatch above). It is a pure chroma on the RGB color wheel () midway between violet and rose. In HSV color space, magenta has a hue of 300°. In a color proximity sense, a primary color has a color range of 120° (60° on each side of the color's hue) and any color has to be within that range to be considered a variation of that color. Secondary colors have a color range of 60° (30°), tertiary colors have a color range of 30° (15°), quaternary colors have a color range of 15° (7.5°), quinary colors have a color range of 7.5° (3.75°), and so on. Because magenta is located at a hue angle of 300°, it has a tertiary color range of 285° and 315°, and any color out of this range is more related to violet or rose than magenta. Magenta is not a spectral but an extraspectral color: it cannot be generated by light of a single wavelength. Humans, being trichromats, can only see as far as 380 nanometers into the spectrum, i.e., as far as violet. The hue magenta is the complement of green: magenta pigments absorb green light, thus magenta and green are opposite colors. This makes magenta an "extra-spectral color". Before printer's magenta was invented in the 1890s for CMYK printing, and electric magenta was invented in the 1980s for computer displays, these two artificially engineered colors were preceded by the color displayed at right, which is the color originally called magenta made from coal tar dyes in the year 1859. Besides being called original magenta, magenta dye color is also called rich magenta to distinguish it from the colors printer's magenta and electric magenta, shown below. Magenta was one of the first aniline dyes, discovered shortly after the Battle of Magenta (1859), which occurred near the town of Magenta in northern Italy.
