Surprise quiz! What color indicates high temperatures? If you’re like me, you’ll answer “red” (also because my answer to almost everything about color is “red”). If you’re scientifically minded, you’ll have chosen blue, because you know that the hottest stars in the universe emit blue light, blue flames burn hotter than red ones, and a whole bunch of weird stuff of the same kind. If you’re like Jordy Bellido (namely someone who very cleverly developed a great sense of danger whenever I ask a seemingly simple question), you would cautiously answer, “It depends. And, in the latter case, you would be right. It was a trick question.
As a general rule, we tend to think that red means hot and blue means cold. That’s a pretty universal assumption, and all the better, otherwise there would be a lot of accidents involving hot and cold water taps. We blush when we’ve been out in the sun too long, and we turn a bluish hue when we’re stupid (or drunk) enough to venture out of the cabin without the proper clothes. In different contexts, we understand that glowing embers are the secret to a delicious barbecue while the blue and white flames of a gas oven will scorch everything they touch.
But what about the color between red and blue? What about purple? Purple is a strange shade. In kindergarten, the teachers tell us that by mixing blue paint and red paint you get purple. In practice, you realize that mixing red paint and blue paint gives a kind of indefinable and horrible dull color, which will remain as the symbol of the trauma you suffered during your early childhood because of lying uttered by authority figures. It’s not hot at all.
Ultra Violet 100V © Clockwork
Later, scarred by preschool experiences with uncooperative art materials and lies spread by educators, you may decide to take a cold, logical approach to investigating purple and its associated hues. You might find that – shock and horror! – purple does not exist on the visible light spectrum, the range of electromagnetic energy wavelengths we perceive as color. The closest thing to purple on the visible light spectrum is violet, and it’s not even supposed to look like purple at all. Because of the way our brains are programmed to respond to visual information received by our eyes, intense blue toward high frequency, the low wavelength end of the visible light spectrum is interpreted by our brain as a purple color. Violet light triggers both blue and red color receptors in our eyes, even without the presence of red light, and our brain then tells us that we are looking at something purple. Nice, right? (On the other hand, definitely not nice for our brains to lie to us that way, like kindergarten teachers.)
But let’s say you grow up and have a career in watch journalism, and one day in the summer of 2022 you come across a watch called the UR100V UltraViolet, made by URWERK, a brand you really like. You listen to co-founder and chief designer Martin Frei talk about the mystical link between the visible and the invisible, about reality and our brain’s interpretation of it. You are looking at a watch that appears purple (a color that does not exist on the visible light spectrum), that evokes violet (a color our brains are unable to process properly) and is called UltraViolet (a color that our eyes cannot even perceive).
At this stage you are fired up by intellectual stimulation, a situation that is not improved by the other co-founder of URWERK, the master watchmaker Felix Baumgartner. It designates the new hour carousel, in an easier-to-read configuration. He re-explains the two other indications, located on the side of the watch: the rotational distance traveled in 20 minutes by the surface of the earth, as measured at the level of the Equator, and the distance traveled in 20 minutes by the earth around from its orbit. As our planet moves through space, what role can a mechanical watch play in ONE such cosmic act? By the way, space is permeated with ultraviolet rays. The earth’s atmosphere actually blocks 77% of the UV rays that emanate from the sun. Lucky for us, because life is better without the daily risk of being burned alive. The UR100V UltraViolet is a good reminder of how lucky we are that the earth exists in what astrobiologists call the ideal zone, the circumstellar habitable zone that is neither too close nor too far from the sun. It is neither too hot nor too cold.
So what is the temperature of purple? As we learned from the first paragraph, we know the answer is “it depends”. But if we talk about the URWERK UR100V UltraViolet, then clearly it is the warmest of colors.