this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Gold is – it's an orangeish yellow. I think what you're meaning is that when people say "gold", they usually are referring to the material properties of the metal as well. But the actual color does have a spectral hue. Magenta on the other hand, (including shades of pink that fall under magenta) is not a spectral color, and is just how our brain interprets the combination of signals from our red and blue cones.
Right. If you took a picture of a piece of gold and either sampled a point or blurred it together to one color, it wouldn't look like gold any more.
I'm not quite sure what you mean. If you took a picture of an orange and sampled a pixel from it, it wouldn't look like an orange (fruit) any more, but it would look orange (color). Likewise sampling a pixel from a picture of a piece of gold wouldn't look like gold (metal), but it would still be gold (color).
It would just be yellow
https://www.w3.org/wiki/CSS/Properties/color/keywords
Gold just looks like a dull yellow out of context.