Magenta: Resistance, and a humanistic look at the future
If you couldn't tell, magenta is my favorite color. It dominates my life, from the styling of this website, to my desktop background, theme, phone wallpaper, even my phone case. All of it is magenta. My hair is (or will be, or was) magenta. I consider it the best of all the hues to choose from, particularly at full saturation (however, for backgrounds I admit defeat to a plain and simple pure black), though lately I lean toward redder hues of magenta, like rose (#FF0080), or printer's magenta (#FF0090).
Personal
Let's start with a very surface level reason I love magenta. It's like pink but with POWER. Pink is a muted pastel of red. It's beautiful and cute, but it lacks the sort of vibrancy I find in life. Things, for me, are best in their most instense form, and even soft things I find can be experienced with intensity. A room that is quiet to someone I often find overwhelming. I feel that a vibrant shade truly encapsulates that feeling. It's overwhelming, and beautiful, and sometimes it hurts, but you just have to keep going. To endure. To leave your mark.
It's bright, like I believe myself to be at my best. Even with my penchant for wearing black and a general dissatisfaction for the state of things, I want to look for a solution, I want to work for things to become better. I teeter on the edge of nihilism and optimism. Between darkness and the future.
Counter-culture
Magenta is a counter-culture color. Aside from its obvious association with pink; and thus, patriarchal femininity, as has been thoroughly established, it is uniquely underepresented as a hue in general use. I find a good microcosm of this lack of use in general design is by looking at the logos and design language of large companies. When looking at a logo list of the entire fortune 500 catalog, you will find that none of them contain any magenta, except for maybe Burlington, which is so close to red it's not even funny. The only company with a truly magenta logo is T-Mobile. If magenta is used at all, it's a deep, muted shade. Even purple is relatively rare. Red and blue are extremely present. Corporations shy away from making statements in an effort to be as palatable as possible, because the color magenta is a statement. It's a statement of powerful femininity. Not that this hasn't been co-opted many times over by "pinkwashing" companies like Barbie, PINK, and Cosmopolitan - but magenta also has a sort of riot grrrl vibe about it that I find enticing. It is a rare color to see out in the world (unless your world involves a lot of flowers, then good on you!). It stands out, and it has a lot to say. Unlike pink which tells women to be cute and straightforward (although, pink is great in its own ways, no hate for the pink lovers out there and I'm speaking in a general sense), it is opinionated, and it clashes with other colors. Magenta is resistance to making another finance company with a blue logo that increases shareholder value by driving innovation in the B2B SaaS market. Magenta would not fly in such an environment (unless you subscribe to "girlboss capitalism", whereby including women in positions of power somehow resolves all harm of patriarchy). It both does not allow itself to be ignored and cannot be ignored. It is resistance to systems designed to keep you quiet and busy. It is resistance to being told to fit in a box, to be what is expected, to want not and give all that you have.
It's Human
Magenta is a deeply and profoundly human color. It is the most human of all hues on the color spectrum. Why? Because it is a construction of the brain (moreso than other hues).
Let me elaborate. All light is composed of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and/or photons. Light activates the cones in your eyes at different amounts depending on the wavelengths within that light. Rather than sensing the wavelengths in a 1:1 mapping of wavelength to hue, your brain weighs the overall activation of each of the three types of cones you have and produces a sort of average for that region of space you are looking at. Even activation results in white, while disproportionate activation of one or two types creates a stronger hue.
When observing a pure beam of each wavelength of light, we can map each wavelength of visible light to a hue from red to violet. Notably, however, magenta is not able to be produced by any pure wavelength - it is a combination of the two ends of the visible light spectrum - red and violet. To have your brain interpret something as magenta, you must stimulate cones for red and violet at the same time.
Magenta is the one hue of color that is uniquely human - an experience constructed by the brain with no grounding in physics. It's messy, and nuanced, like we ourselves often are. Magenta comes about in our need to discern things from others - our brain's way of interpreting a complex reality and building coherent thought.
I consider magenta to capture the most important things about what it means to be human. Our brain builds meaning from nothing, and as a group we build meaning from nothing. We build meaning so much that we create societies and technology and constantly strive to be. We live life because we must and we look forward because we can. It is meaningless and profound, and none of it makes any sense but it's there anyway, and we have to learn to accept it.
Future
I consider magenta to be the color of the future - of progress and growth. It's artificial but deeply rooted in humanity. I have grown up in a culture that equates technological growth with the concept of progress. That, through technology, any problem can be solved. In a way, my entire life has existed within this framework. I am a software engineer and have grown up with a profound fascination with computers, science, and technology. I do believe that there is a technological solution to many problems the world faces today. But I also believe that many of our problems are human, and they involve caring for others and rethinking the structure of our lives in a way that is rooted in care and sustainability. To me, magenta represents that future - one where a faithful combination of technology and serious commitment to progress can be used to produce a caring, free, and fair world. One where we do not abandon our vibrancy and uniqueness, our bright outlook, and our humanity.
Conclusion
It is not just one of these qualities that makes magenta the best color. It's all of them, together. If it were just one of these, it would fall flat before reaching its potential. It requires the strength of an entire spectrum to take victory, and magenta captures every color from red to violet.