History Main / FictionalColour

** ''H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham: Unveiling the Legend-Haunted City'', Adventure "Uncle Silas's Books". If the PlayerCharacters decide to burn the title magical books, the books will explode in flames that have colors unknown on Earth.

* Being a combination of colors on two opposite ends of the light spectrum, the color magenta doesn't actually exist. It is what happens when your eyes detect both red and violet light, and your brain mashes them together.
** For that matter, colors ''of any sort'' are simply the brain's way of illustrating differences in light's electromagnetic wavelength, not something inherent to the light-energy itself.

* In ''Fanfic/{{Luminosity}}'', Bella is pleasantly surprised that vampires can see ultraviolet; later Elspeth is quite disoriented by vampire [[TransferableMemory memories]] that include that color.

* In ''Fanfic/{{Luminosity}}'', Bella is pleasantly surprised that vampires can see in the ultraviolet; later Elspeth is quite disoriented by vampire memories that include that color.

* The first series episode ''Madness is a Strange Colour'' of Creator/TheBBC Radio Four sitcom Radio/{{Nebulous}} features the newly discovered colour "garrow", which drives people insane. It's described as "a sort of yellowy-black, but with more of a pinky-green feel". The imaginary[[note]]([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountbatten_pink maybe]])[[/note]] colour "battleship mauve" is also frequently mentioned.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Rolemaster}}'' campaign setting ''Shadow World''. When creatures of the Void cast spells, it creates a rainbow of impossible colors.
* ''Polaris''. The dawn's first appearance is described in the gamebook: "Light coming up from the edge of the sky, colors redder than stars, new shades that had never been seen, yellow and green and golden through the icicle walls, burning out the stars from the sky, brilliant and impossible and beautiful and alien."

* GDW's ''TabletopGame/DarkConspiracy'' adventure ''Hellsgate''. The extra-dimensional gate in the Temple of Kukulcan randomly glows up and down all the colors of the spectrum, and some that are not part of the spectrum.

* In one of the Icecrown missions in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'', a gnome technician gives you a pair of "infra-green" goggles so you can find their secret base on one of the citadel's spires. This might be a ShoutOut to the TV show ''Series/TheGreenHornet'', whose car [[CoolCar the Black Beauty]] has infra-green headlights (although those technically used polarized light).
* When learning about dyes in ''VideoGame/WildStar'', you help a [[WeSellEverything Protostar]] representative retrieve an order of "Plurbinum" dye, a copyrighted color developed by their MegaCorp.

* In ''Webcomic/ArthurKingOfTimeAndSpace'' both Olympians and fairies can see into the ultraviolet. The fairies have names for ultraviolet colours, which surprises Hercules.

* The WebOriginal/ProtectorsOfThePlotContinuum have documented [[http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Sue_Colour_Spectrum a large number of impossible colors]]. Among the ones they've discovered are, in addition to the ones described in ''Fanfic/TheOfficialFanfictionUniversityOfMiddleEarth'', bismange, blello, hreen, purite bledangle, rolky-mose, smood gred and wilver. [[BrownNote Lots of them are physically painful to look at]].

* ''Literature/TheLightbringerSeries'' features, among others mentioned, paryl. The magic system in this fantasy series is based on colours and paryl is invisible to most, extremely hard to draft (do magic with) and very weak, but used by Teia, who, from book two onwards, is a main character. She has to keep it secret as colours other than those of the regular spectrum are considered blasphemic. [[ShownTheirWork Information]] in book description and the author's notes in the appendix suggests that "paryl" light is how Teia sees [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation terahertz radiation.]]
* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' describes hooloovoo, a shade of blue that is ''sentient''. As a ShoutOut, this shade appears in ''Series/DoctorWho'', in the episode [[Recap/DoctorWhoS33E7TheRingsOfAkhaten "The Rings of Akhaten"]].
** The third book describes a lair with the colors Ultra Violent, Infra Dead, Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt Hombre, and Gan Green. These colors are only mentioned in passing and have no significance other than to convey how horrendously ugly the lair is.
* ''Literature/{{Discworld}}''
** The color octarine, which is the eighth colour that only wizards can see. It is described as being approximately "a sort of fluorescent yellowish-greenish-purple", which may be based on the splashes of afterimage one sees after staring into a bright light. Non-wizards can't see it directly, but can pick it out from where other colours aren't.
** There are also different colours of black, mentioned both in Death's garden in ''Literature/{{Mort}}'' and Assassins' Guild uniforms in ''Literature/{{Pyramids}}''. Usually only visible when darkness is split by an eight sided prism in a strong magical field, you can apparently simulate them by taking something illegal and taking a long look at a starling's wing.
** Inverted with the color of infinity, which Death describes as "duck-egg blue".
* ''Literature/GoodOmens'' mentions infra-black, which is apparently the color that flashes before your eyes right before you die from a fatal concussion.
* In N.K. Jemisin's ''Literature/InheritanceTrilogy'', in ''The Broken Kingdoms'', the main character is blind, but she can see magic. Since she's not normally sighted, she doesn't know the names of some colors, and makes them up. Regarding the story's FlyingDutchman god-in-human-form, Shiny, Oree calls his eyes "colors I had only heard of in poetry: fire opal. Sunset's cloak. Velvet and desire." Possibly a sort of reddish-yellow. She also makes up the words for the magic of the EldritchAbomination BigBad. His power is "sickly, mottled", a shifting combination of many colors as he has stolen the magic of several gods.
* In ''Literature/{{Sunshine}}'' by Creator/RobinMcKinley the BigBad's eyes are some unknown, impossible color, because what color is evil?

* Creator/EdgarRiceBurroughs' ''Literature/JohnCarterOfMars'' series. The Martians discovered two colors outside the visual spectrum, the Eighth Ray (used for propulsion) and Ninth Ray (used to create the breathable Martian atmosphere).

* When turning into a bee in ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'', Marco describes a color so unbelievably intense humans can't see it, but bee eyes can. This likely refers to "bee purple", a color in the ultraviolet spectrum beyond what humans can see, but bees are able to.

* Dave Gorman, when wanting to write a novel, came up with the idea of a man named Hugh Brown who discovers a new colour. He never actually wrote it, though, due to being a RidiculousProcrastinator, and ended up going on ''Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure'' instead.
** In the Q&A section of his live show, he explained the inherent problem with the idea; that it involved writing about something that didn't exist and couldn't be described.
* In Creator/MarionZimmerBradley's ''The Colors Of Space'', the substance necessary for interstellar stardrive shows up as this, though only under a light too bright for normal humans to stand.
* In Creator/PhilipKDick's ''Literature/{{VALIS}}'', the main character encounters a pink laser beam, but the exact shade of pink exists outside humanity's view of the light spectrum.
* The Franchise/CthulhuMythos short story "The Feaster from Afar" by Joseph Payne Brennan. The description of the title monster said "...its fixed blazing eyes were of no color ever known on Earth."
* In ''Literature/AVoyageToArcturus'' by David Lindsay, the star Arcturus has a companion star, Alpain, which shines with two additional colors, ulfire and jale. Or maybe Arcturians can see ulfire and jale; hard to tell, since the hero arrives on the Arcturian planet Tormance transformed into a local humanoid.
* ''Literature/TheSpaceTrilogy'': Picking up on the color ideas from Lindsay, C. S. Lewis uses them for his eldila (angels/energy beings). They are normally invisible to humans, but under proper lighting conditions, or if the eldil is trying hard, you will see beams and auras of new colors.
* ''Literature/TheThirdPoliceman'', written by Brian O'Nolan under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. One of the bizarre things the protagonist encounters is a paint of an unknown color that drives those that see it mad.
* ''Literature/{{Fairest}}'' by Gail Carson Levine reveals the heroine's hair to be "htun", a colour only gnomes can see, but which humans see as merely black.

* In Eleanor Cameron's ''The Wonderful Flight to the [[FungusHumongous Mushroom Planet]]'', the eccentric scientist discovered the eponymous world by way of his recently invented infra-green filter. (Yeah, Ms. Cameron kinda [[ArtisticLicense played fast and loose with science]]...) but then she's writing a fantasy about a planet too small to have any atmosphere. She discusses this in her book ''The Green and Burning Tree.''
* At the end of John Boorman's never-produced script for Lord of the Rings, Legolas sees a rainbow and says "Look! Only seven colors. Indeed, the world is failing."
* In ''Literature/TheLastOfTheReallyGreatWhangdoodles'', one of the Whangdoodle's powers is being able to turn into whatever color he wants. When asked which color is hardest to do, he says "flange," which is all of the colors of the rainbow, all at once. [[spoiler: He finds flange surprisingly easy to do once he's no longer the last of the Whangdoodles.]]

* Creator/FrankBelknapLong's Franchise/CthulhuMythos novel ''The Space Eaters''. The narrator and his friend discuss {{Eldritch Abomination}}s, one property of which is being of a color unknown on Earth.

* Creator/IsaacAsimov's "Literature/TheWeaponTooDreadfulToUse": The native of Venus have much, much greater colour perception than humans. This becomes a plot point, as it means no humans can read their ancient languages without a spectrograph. [[spoiler: Particularly the operating manual for the ForgottenSuperweapon mentioned in the title.]]
* In ''Literature/ThisImmortal'', the [[HumanoidAliens Vegans]] perceive a different range of colours than humans do, starting deeper down in the ultraviolet range and stopping before red. This results in them seeing two colours where humans see white.
* ''Literature/FourteenOhEight'': After a cleaning lady was momentarily locked up inside room 1408, she was rendered blind and could only see "the most awful colors" that she had no name for.
* The Franchise/ConanTheBarbarian story "Literature/TheFrostGiantsDaughter". When Conan meets the title character Atali, he sees that her eyes are filled with "...clouds of colors he could not define."

* From Brazil there's children's book ''[[https://docslide.net/documents/flicts-in-english.html Flicts]]'', about a different color that doesn't fit anywhere. So it searches for its place, ultimately leading to a fairly distant one: "Not many will know it, but the Moon is flicts". [[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5DlawxpPd-s/U3M3k1N8CnI/AAAAAAAANz8/hmetUK1FLzw/s1600/DSCF3449.JPG Neil Armstrong himself agrees]] (in a meeting with Armstrong, the author showed the color used in the book, a soil-like beige, and asked if the moon surface was like that, which the astronaut said was true).
* In ''The Book Of Ultimate Truths'' by Creator/RobertRankin, when Brother Rizla is explaining to a sceptical Cornelius and Tuppe about the amazing discoveries made by Hugo Rune, he reveals that there are actually three colours whose existence has been concealed from humanity. Apparently this is with good reason, as when Cornelius' brain tries to make sense of one of them, "a reddy yellowy bluey greenish blackish sort of white -- except that it was not", his eyes start watering; Rizla tells him that the second will make him break out in hives, and the third will put him in a coma.
* The Guvnuragnaguvendrugun in ''Literature/TheJenkinsverse'' have a much wider and more precise color range than humans. Conveniently they also have chromatophores that communicate their emotions on this entire color range so while they can't describe the colors to humans, they can at least name them based on what emotion they mean.
** Most of the galaxy, however, are dichromats. So for them ''red'' is a fictional color.

[[quoteright:350:[[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/chimerical_color_demo.png]]]]

* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation''

* As reported in [[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seeing-forbidden-colors Scientific American]] and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_colors the other wiki]] citing [[http://www.jstor.org/pss/1691544 Science]], through various bits of optical illusion type gimmickery, people can see and recognize a Fictional Colour - two, in fact: the color that is a blend of blue and yellow that is not green, and the color that is a blend of green and red that is not ick brown. There's also Stygian Blue, resulting from fatigue caused by staring at bright yellow then looking at something black. There are others listed on Wiki/TheOtherWiki's page for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color Impossible Colors]].

The Fictional Colour is usually found in SpeculativeFiction. It may indicate the presence or influence of magic, such as when a MagicalSensoryEffect is in play. Sometimes it can only be seen by certain species or types of people. When not associated with magic, it's used to give some sort of descriptor to concepts that cannot be expressed by actual colors visible to the human eye, especially when it comes to energy. For example, any sort of infrared or ultraviolet vision changes things to a form we can comprehend, and works like ComicBook/IncredibleHulk have caused gamma energy to be associated with green.

** Apocyan, the blue of memory, usually found on particularly glowy and valuable bits of Unterzee coral and occasionally its waves. Not quite as special as the rest (even its respective high-profession item, the Crooked Cross, is just colored in Apocyan because it looks pretty), and possibly the most common of the lot. Dreaming in Apocyan as part of the Fire Sermon can produce daguerreotypes (19th-century photographs) of things that you saw in the dream.

* There are multiple alleles for the various color receptor genes in the human eye; some humans have two alleles for the same colors, and thus end up with a pair of close but not identical color receptors in their eyes. They are tetrachromats, but exactly how their vision differs from a normal person's is still being investigated - they do not see a whole new world of colors, but there is some evidence that they may be slightly better at distinguishing colors from each other.

* There are a few highly light-absorbent materials such as VantaBlack which are described as "blacker than black". They reflect so little light that the eye has a hard time focusing and some people get headaches. Didn't keep BMW from coating a car in it, though.

* The WebOriginal/ProtectorsOfThePlotContinuum have documented [[http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Sue_Colour_Spectrum a large number of impossible colors]]. Among the ones they've discovered are, in addition to the ones described in ''Fanfic/TheOfficialFanfictionUniversityOfMiddleEarth'', bismange, blello, hreen, purite bledangle, rolky-mose, smood gred and wilver.

* ''WesternAnimation/StarVsTheForcesOfEvil'' Brings us "Pony Head Color" which is apparently very popular on Mewni.

** As explained on The Other Wiki, the human brain's visual centers are actually capable of perceiving a wider range of colors than the human eye can physically detect. Thus why some people on ''severe'' hallucinatory drug trips claim that they can see indescribable colors they never knew existed before. The problem of course is that these impossible colors ''cannot'' exist in a form that everyone else can "see", because they can never truly be detected by the human eye. They're difficult to describe, given that there's no frame of reference to compare them to. Nonetheless people do comprehend them as some kind of "color", though they can't really match words to them.

* As reported in [[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seeing-forbidden-colors Scientific American]] and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_colors the other wiki]] citing [[http://www.jstor.org/pss/1691544 Science]], through various bits of optical illusion type gimmickery, people can see and recognize a Fictional Colour - two, in fact: the color that is a blend of blue and yellow that is not green, and the color that is a blend of green and red that is not ick brown. The "greenish-purple" described in the page quote is one of these. There's also Stygian Blue, resulting from fatigue caused by staring at bright yellow then looking at something black. There are others listed on Wiki/TheOtherWiki's page for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color Impossible Colors]].

** And Finally there's Gant, which remains when all other colors are gone. Quite hard to find, and usually ''bad'' news when you do. Gant writing can only be read in near-complete darkness, and it can be used to directly erase any other color (which makes it valuable for tattoo removal). [[RunningGag It's more beige than one might expect,]] though it does have a reddish tinge to it.

** There is Irrigo, the unremembered color, a brilliant shade of purple which causes people to forget things the longer they are exposed to it, and soaks into you like radiation after a while. The body may start growing bone over the eyesockets if the exposure is particularly severe. Of the colors, it's perhaps the most dangerous, as prolonged exposure can utterly destroy a person, leaving a wandering husk that doesn't know anything and cannot learn more. Memories will come back for lesser exposure, but something will always be forever lost. Occasionally used as BrainBleach by the extremely traumatized, and commonly by spies who need to forget certain bits of critical data on a regular basis.

** And then there's Gant, which remains when all other colors are gone. Quite hard to find, and usually ''bad'' news when you do. Gant writing can only be read in near-complete darkness, and it can be used to directly erase any other color (which makes it valuable for tattoo removal). [[RunningGag It's more beige than one might expect,]] though it does have a reddish tinge to it.

** There is also Violant, described as the color of necessary but troublesome connections. It also semi-counters Irrigo, and anything written in Violant ink is very hard to forget. Treaties written in Violant ink tend to be the result of very desperate times, for this reason. It's also called the color of perilous understanding; people who study [[LanguageOfMagic the Correspondence]] use Violant ink often not just to remember what they've learned, but to understand it. Of course, nothing stops it from making you understand [[TheseAreThingsManWasNotMeantToKnow things you shouldn't understand]]. It's the color that gets depicted the most inconsistently, either as iridescent peacock or as wine-red.

In any event, it is almost always confined to [[{{Literature}} non-visual]] [[{{Radio}} forms]] of storytelling, for obvious reasons. If we actually saw it, well, it wouldn't be fictional.

** Apocyan, the blue of memory, usually found on particularly glowy and valuable bits of Unterzee coral and occasionally its waves. Not quite as special as the rest (even its respective high-profession item, the Crooked Cross, is just colored in Apocyan because it looks pretty), and possibly the most common of the lot.

** [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/log-of-anomalous-items Log of Anomalous Items]]. 3 of the pencils in a box of 24 Crayola-brand pencils are in colors that don't exist in nature. The colors are named "moiter," "emilet" and [[Webcomic/Homestuck \"cankri\"]].