The Pink Peony Problem

My moth­er brought me a bou­quet of peonies yes­ter­day, my favorite flower. Hers range from white with fuch­sia-tinged edges to pale pink to a vibrant, deep rasp­ber­ry. This was the first bou­quet of the sea­son and the first time I have tru­ly seen her peonies in all the years she has grown them. You prob­a­bly know by now that I am col­or­blind, a rar­i­ty in women (less than half a per­cent of women are col­or­blind, com­pared to more than 8% of men). This means my eyes don’t absorb pho­tons, or light par­ti­cles, as well as the aver­age bear, so every­thing looks mut­ed and sepia-toned, like Kansas before Dorothy gets to Oz. But thanks to tech­nol­o­gy, I now have what I call “mag­ic glass­es,” which allow me to take in more light par­ti­cles and see the world like every­one else.

So, while this was the first time I saw them, I didn’t actu­al­ly see them. All the yoga stu­dents that com­ment­ed on these gor­geous pink beau­ties? They didn’t see them either. 

Confused? Let me explain. 

The Science

Among the vast and vibrant palette of col­ors we per­ceive in the world, pink holds a curi­ous place because it is not a col­or that tru­ly exists in the phys­i­cal world. It is, instead, an inven­tion of the human brain. 

Perception begins with light (specif­i­cal­ly, elec­tro­mag­net­ic radi­a­tion of var­i­ous wave­lengths). The vis­i­ble spec­trum ranges from vio­let (short wave­lengths) to red (long wave­lengths). Every col­or we see is the result of how our eyes and brains inter­pret this spec­trum. When pho­tons hit an object, every col­or of the spec­trum is present, but most are absorbed. The col­or reflect­ed the most is the col­or your eye “sees.” For exam­ple, with an apple, every col­or except red is absorbed. 

Red and vio­let lie on oppo­site ends of the spec­trum. There is no wave­length of light that cor­re­sponds to pink, no P in ROY G BIV.  The idea of pink aris­es when our brains are pre­sent­ed with a mix of high-ener­gy (blue/violet) and low-ener­gy (red) light with­out the pres­ence of green. In oth­er words, pink is the brain’s cre­ative solu­tion to a prob­lem: how to rec­on­cile input from both ends of the vis­i­ble spec­trum while skip­ping the mid­dle. The result is a col­or that doesn’t exist in the light spec­trum but exists quite vivid­ly in our minds. 

The Lesson

The sto­ry of those pink peonies then is not just about col­or, but about the human expe­ri­ence. Our brains are not sim­ply pas­sive receivers of infor­ma­tion, but active cre­ators of real­i­ty. In the absence of a straight­for­ward answer, our brain invents one. It fills in blanks, bridges gaps, and cre­ates mean­ing where none objec­tive­ly exists. The pink we “see” is a metaphor for how we nav­i­gate the world: not by per­ceiv­ing it exact­ly as it is, but by inter­pret­ing it in ways that make sense to us.

We are wired to make con­nec­tions, to find beau­ty, and to cre­ate coher­ence in a world that often resists sim­ple expla­na­tion. Pink teach­es us that per­cep­tion is not just obser­va­tion, but also inven­tion. Those flamin­go-col­ored peonies are a reminder that some of the most beau­ti­ful things in life are not ground­ed in cold, hard real­i­ty, but as prod­ucts of the mind. Like music, poet­ry, and love, pink is a cre­ation that defies objec­tive mea­sure­ment but res­onates deeply, nonethe­less. It shows that our world is not mere­ly what is but also what we dream, what we hope, and what we imagine.