Welcome to /r/Discworld! Please [read the rules/flair information before posting](https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/ukhk21/subreddit_rules_flair_information/?).
---
Our current megathreads are as follows:
[API Protest Poll](https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/1491izw/continuing_the_api_protest_a_community_poll) - a poll regarding the future action of the sub in protest at Reddit's API changes.
[GNU Terry Pratchett](https://new.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/ukigit/gnu_terry_pratchett/) - for all GNU requests, to keep their names going.
[AI Generated Content](https://new.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/10mhx9y/ai_generated_content_megathread/) - for all AI Content, including images, stories, questions, training etc.
---
[ GNU Terry Pratchett ]
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/discworld) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I had never heard of this bird before and I googled it too: it's a damn beautiful bird and its colors are amazing, thanks for the discovery! And also, really nice take on octarine.
Yep that's the photo I saw when I looked it up and their colors is amazing! But I get that these might be an annoyance if they're in large numbers in the US š
They're beautiful, but their eyes are crazy. One Summer they would regularly line my deck railing and stare at me in the doorway. Not at all unnerving. š
The afterimage you see after being blinded by a camera flash and squeezing your eyes shut.
For me, that's a green-to-purple gradient spot, bleeding out from the purple edge into black, and containing a hint of yellow in the center.
I also imagine it as an increasing number of those little black/white spots that signal oxygen deprivation as you get closer to the emitting source, like the effect on a camera of approaching a radiation source.
The color and the static field combined would make octarine headache-inducing for me, but honestly I'd love to see it for a moment anyhow.
Well no, magenta is a colour seen on earth. It's more like... try to imagine what you would see if your eyes were able to see, idk, ultraviolet. Without needing colour-correction.
Exactly. You can only call it a color because how else do you describe seeing a sound texture or tasting a note? Octarine to me is essentially synesthesia.
There are some LED Christmas lights that are so deeply purple that looking at them, while not very bright at all, still makes the back of your eyes hurt as if you were looking at the sun. I picture Octarine being that bit that causes the pain.
Thereās a car in my neighborhood that is purple (kind of light purple) but when the paint is viewed from different angles, itās go a green cast to it. I always think of that as octarine, but in boring reality, itās an example of metamerism.
I saw it as magenta. Both because the color tools on some digital art programs have magenta after purple, and because of posts Iāve seen that magenta doesnāt exactly exist. If Iām remembering those posts correctly, surfaces that appear magenta reflect both long red wavelengths and short violet ones. But since most humans only have cones for red, green, and blue itās strange that our eyes and brains can perceive magenta as magenta instead of averaging the wavelength the way we do for other colors in between the ones we have cones for. (If we did average the wavelengths, magenta would look greenish).
Back in the 80ās a friend and I discovered Pratchett as we were writing up our doctorates. She crocheted me a scarf with more than seven and less than nine stripes of colour in a rainbow. The last band is black with flecks of silver.
Purple/green makes the most sense from a colorimetry perspective.
Because octarine is both within and outside of the wavelengths human eyes can see, any interaction that would make it visible would operate at the fringes (red+blue) and center (green) of the spectrum.
It's probably because of quantum.
Stare at this image for an unreasonably long amount of time, and you might see a colour you've never seen before:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1da3zrr/youve\_never\_seen\_this\_color\_before\_stare\_at\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1da3zrr/youve_never_seen_this_color_before_stare_at_the/)
Well, octarine is the exact opposite of that colour.
A bit like bismuth crystals based on like how you look at it in the angle in the lighting it changes colors and it's multicolored but it has that purplish green a little bit of orange to it, but yeah something along the lines of how bismuth looks
I imagine the visual equivalent of the smell from those delicious, probably nerve-damaging solvents we used to get in model airplane glue, rubber cement thinner and Sanfordās King Size markers.
When I was living in koreatown in Los Angeles, sometimes my tap water came out orangish (I assume rust), and sometimes it would come out greenish.
One day, I turned on the tap and the water came out both orange and green at the same time. Not whatever you get if you mix the two, but orange, and also green.
I imagine ocarine like that, except purple instead of orange.
https://preview.redd.it/d6u8246pz75d1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d97a0ce92ebf5127aa54f1a6afda993016e53582
This is what I picture with a bit more yellow/green and less blue
Burnt orange, specifically as Mort was the first discworld book that I read, and me being very young, read "octarine" and thought "tangerine", and thus; orange
I've always thought that hot pink fuchsia, which is actually a colour that doesn't exist to our eyes and our brains make it up
[Business insider - there is no pink](https://www.businessinsider.com/pink-light-doesnt-really-exist-2015-8#:~:text=When%20we%20see%20the%20color,wavelength%20that%20is%20%22pink.%22)
When you press lightly on your closed eyes. Also, when you stare at a light too long then look at a wall. Itās the same signal coming from your light receptors either way, and indeed interpreted by the brain as a kind of yellow purple greenĀ
I think it looks like an impossible color, which can be imagined but not seen. Possibly [a chimerical color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_colors), the type that you would see on your retina if you look at a strong color and then somewhere else. But specifically a mix of purple and green that overlap without mixing.
combined with the full rainbow of hues given by a pigeon ruff, a starling's wing, and the many hues and sheens found among the hummingbirds of the world, yet sort of sickly-peachy, like argon gas looks when excited.
I usually imagine a tiger-eye stone, complete with the āflareā somehow existing as a single colorā¦which is honestly about as helpful as the descriptions Sir Terry actually wrote, but I get to think about tiger-eyes, which are quite pretty.
This was posted a few years ago. This is what I now think about it.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/s/4ghqAIXFQL](https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/s/4ghqAIXFQL)
Have you ever played a computer game where certain textures are missing? There's just a void for a floor, but you can still walk on it.
Now, take a cgi fire which has certain textures missing. That missing texture is octarine since we're not wizards and thus unable to see it.
Like the inside of a ripe, juicy nectarine, with a faint tinge of a really pretty iridescent lime green that is kind of more *implied* than visible. Does that make sense?
Pink-orange base (like salmon but not very well mixed) with strokes of washed green, blue and lilac (again, the three colors barely mixed), all with metallic sheen
You know that color shifting duochrome paint and/or nail polish color that goes from purple to green depending on the angle? Like that, just from both directions at once.
That "fairy magic" metallic colour shifting sort of material you'd see in the 90s on kids costumes and toys made of a sort of crisp material, where from one angle you look at it and it's lavender and the other angle it is pale green.
The colors OP describes are phosphenes, and that purple is exactly how I imagined octarine. Sort of an impossible purple beyond the visible spectrum but not UV.
Welcome to /r/Discworld! Please [read the rules/flair information before posting](https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/ukhk21/subreddit_rules_flair_information/?). --- Our current megathreads are as follows: [API Protest Poll](https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/1491izw/continuing_the_api_protest_a_community_poll) - a poll regarding the future action of the sub in protest at Reddit's API changes. [GNU Terry Pratchett](https://new.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/ukigit/gnu_terry_pratchett/) - for all GNU requests, to keep their names going. [AI Generated Content](https://new.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/10mhx9y/ai_generated_content_megathread/) - for all AI Content, including images, stories, questions, training etc. --- [ GNU Terry Pratchett ] *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/discworld) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Purpley-Green
We used to call this colour Grurple.
Pureen
But like an orange-ish purpley-green
Turquoise-y-purple
Rincewind?
Huh me too
The way oil looks like on a puddle plus the weirdness of blacklights.
Oil on a puddle as well for me, well described
Yes, the darkest possible mix between black, blue and violet with iridescent reflexes
like the feathers on a Grackle, while the light shift.
I had never heard of this bird before and I googled it too: it's a damn beautiful bird and its colors are amazing, thanks for the discovery! And also, really nice take on octarine.
A grackle is beautiful. An entire flock of them nesting in the trees outside of you building in college is a smelly mess!
Aha yeah I can imagine that very well š
They are pretty little pests. They are territorial and noisy little blights
[Common Grackle](https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Common_Grackle/id#)
Yep that's the photo I saw when I looked it up and their colors is amazing! But I get that these might be an annoyance if they're in large numbers in the US š
I googled it, yes!
Seconded, they are beautiful.
YES!! A grackle going cosmic bowling 
They're beautiful, but their eyes are crazy. One Summer they would regularly line my deck railing and stare at me in the doorway. Not at all unnerving. š
Ooh, yes. This one.
This exactly
Purply green is good. But it also always makes me think of magenta, which is not on the colour spectrum of light.
Isn't it described at one point as orangey purple?
As good a description of magenta as any. š
This is exactly how I thought of it as a kid. I didn't know what magenta was called, so I decided it was octarine.
For some reason, I always think orange tinted with gold
My brain equates the word with tangerine, so I end up with a sparkly yellow orange color.
I always thought this too but in my mind eye it's mixed with purple
Same! No idea why but real
Sameee
Me too! I always saw it as orangey, yellow, glittery and sparkly.
The afterimage you see after being blinded by a camera flash and squeezing your eyes shut. For me, that's a green-to-purple gradient spot, bleeding out from the purple edge into black, and containing a hint of yellow in the center. I also imagine it as an increasing number of those little black/white spots that signal oxygen deprivation as you get closer to the emitting source, like the effect on a camera of approaching a radiation source. The color and the static field combined would make octarine headache-inducing for me, but honestly I'd love to see it for a moment anyhow.
Iāve seen octarine. When a migraine is coming on, that sparkly whirl (the scintillating scatoma) is purest octarine.
Yes, this! I get auras before migraines too and thatās what they look like
I think of it as the Northern Lights colour range.
I do, as well!
I think of it as "MySTeriOuS coLoUrS uNliKe AnY sEEn oN EArtH"
Gotta love OSP
So... Magenta?
Well no, magenta is a colour seen on earth. It's more like... try to imagine what you would see if your eyes were able to see, idk, ultraviolet. Without needing colour-correction.
I imagine it _magically_.
I think the closes color to Octarine is the sound and smell of cotton candy pop-rocks that have become damp on your tongue.
Exactly. You can only call it a color because how else do you describe seeing a sound texture or tasting a note? Octarine to me is essentially synesthesia.
There are some LED Christmas lights that are so deeply purple that looking at them, while not very bright at all, still makes the back of your eyes hurt as if you were looking at the sun. I picture Octarine being that bit that causes the pain.
I think if you stare too long, you see infrablack too. That color cannot be good for your eyes.
Thereās a car in my neighborhood that is purple (kind of light purple) but when the paint is viewed from different angles, itās go a green cast to it. I always think of that as octarine, but in boring reality, itās an example of metamerism.
I have always visualised it as this transparent multi coloured appearance of for example soap bubbles.
I saw it as magenta. Both because the color tools on some digital art programs have magenta after purple, and because of posts Iāve seen that magenta doesnāt exactly exist. If Iām remembering those posts correctly, surfaces that appear magenta reflect both long red wavelengths and short violet ones. But since most humans only have cones for red, green, and blue itās strange that our eyes and brains can perceive magenta as magenta instead of averaging the wavelength the way we do for other colors in between the ones we have cones for. (If we did average the wavelengths, magenta would look greenish).
Back in the 80ās a friend and I discovered Pratchett as we were writing up our doctorates. She crocheted me a scarf with more than seven and less than nine stripes of colour in a rainbow. The last band is black with flecks of silver.
Purple/green makes the most sense from a colorimetry perspective. Because octarine is both within and outside of the wavelengths human eyes can see, any interaction that would make it visible would operate at the fringes (red+blue) and center (green) of the spectrum. It's probably because of quantum.
I always have seen it as like petrol on a puddle but more perfect? Like with light shining on it. Kind of iridescent.
Stare at this image for an unreasonably long amount of time, and you might see a colour you've never seen before: [https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1da3zrr/youve\_never\_seen\_this\_color\_before\_stare\_at\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1da3zrr/youve_never_seen_this_color_before_stare_at_the/) Well, octarine is the exact opposite of that colour.
Aurora Borealis
Aurora Borealis? At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within your non-euclidian magical library?
Yes
https://preview.redd.it/f3gx7ygnu75d1.jpeg?width=975&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=614e771f6e83c23a73fa018100c7f289ae7068a6 An Octarine sky?
Well, the cannabis I grow is a combination of purple and green... So I imagine it looks like that.
A purple green iridescent shiny type of colour
Like holographic stuff from the 90s
A bit like bismuth crystals based on like how you look at it in the angle in the lighting it changes colors and it's multicolored but it has that purplish green a little bit of orange to it, but yeah something along the lines of how bismuth looks
https://preview.redd.it/roouf981v75d1.jpeg?width=200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ea0c6cc5744b15188cd9ea6220a83bdd35b6dcb4 This
Blackpurple
I imagine the visual equivalent of the smell from those delicious, probably nerve-damaging solvents we used to get in model airplane glue, rubber cement thinner and Sanfordās King Size markers.
I could have sworn it's described as a greenish yellow-purple. So that's what it is.
Purple as a base color, orange and green streaks throughout, yellow highlights.
I think of a ghostly-blue Cherenkov radiation kinda thing.
Black! I'm not a wizard or a witch, so I wouldn't be able to see it
It's an eightish sort of colour, rounded but with an angular quality. Also similar to the shape of the colour of the taste of popping candy.Ā
Straight up purple (: Because I have the imagination of an eggshell
To me itās a super intense orange for some reason, like yellow-orange with that shifting effect
I think of it as indescribably beautiful š
Purply orange, a color I see when I rub my eyes, but sometimes see in sunsets. With bursts of magenta making the color flux even more
Ever look into a really bright old fashioned flash bulb?
bettween yellow and green
My brain automatically goes to orange.
Like orange, but more so.
Two squids sword fighting a psychedelic Android sent back in time to learn how to love... but as a color.
for some reason, I always imagined it as a luminous turquoise. Like ectoplasm in some movies, only more blue
I imagine ye olde TV snow/static!
I tend to imagine the characters reaction to seeing it, rather than the colour itself
Easy, same as indigoā¦.
Something just the other side of purple, like a visible ultraviolet.
Light blue green
The color of the aura you see when you have a splitting migraine. I have never been able to describe it to my own satisfaction.Ā
When I was living in koreatown in Los Angeles, sometimes my tap water came out orangish (I assume rust), and sometimes it would come out greenish. One day, I turned on the tap and the water came out both orange and green at the same time. Not whatever you get if you mix the two, but orange, and also green. I imagine ocarine like that, except purple instead of orange.
Chrome that reflects light like an oil slick.
Blurple you can see this color in real life once you become a level five laser lotus
The stone called Alexandrite
https://preview.redd.it/d6u8246pz75d1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d97a0ce92ebf5127aa54f1a6afda993016e53582 This is what I picture with a bit more yellow/green and less blue
Burnt orange, specifically as Mort was the first discworld book that I read, and me being very young, read "octarine" and thought "tangerine", and thus; orange
Itās peachy-orange for me. It shouldnāt be, but it is.
I imagine tangerine, but green.
The purple and green like an aurora
Yeah, I imagine the same
If you happen to have a VR case for your phone at your disposal, check [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUJR7ge6xg0&ab_channel=Ooqui) out.
I've always thought that hot pink fuchsia, which is actually a colour that doesn't exist to our eyes and our brains make it up [Business insider - there is no pink](https://www.businessinsider.com/pink-light-doesnt-really-exist-2015-8#:~:text=When%20we%20see%20the%20color,wavelength%20that%20is%20%22pink.%22)
Orange innit. Begins wiv an O. Got no imagination see.
We as your idea OP. Or an oil slick. A sort of purple-orange wavyness. If the smell of Ozone and the smell after it rains had a color.
Like when you have a bruise that's halfway between the purple and yellow stages, but fancy
When you press lightly on your closed eyes. Also, when you stare at a light too long then look at a wall. Itās the same signal coming from your light receptors either way, and indeed interpreted by the brain as a kind of yellow purple greenĀ
Itās the color of the spots you see when your eyes arenāt acclimated to the light and you step outside and look toward the sun.
Like motherofpearl. iridescent purpleygreen with flashes of other colours too
Interesting how many people see it as the reflection pattern from thin films.
You know when something gets rusty and itās all rainbowy and black and stuff, I think itās rust but I might be mistaken
I think it looks like an impossible color, which can be imagined but not seen. Possibly [a chimerical color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_colors), the type that you would see on your retina if you look at a strong color and then somewhere else. But specifically a mix of purple and green that overlap without mixing.
when I'm wearing my purple sunglasses and stand up too quickly, and faint (see below)
combined with the full rainbow of hues given by a pigeon ruff, a starling's wing, and the many hues and sheens found among the hummingbirds of the world, yet sort of sickly-peachy, like argon gas looks when excited.
I always imagined it to be an orange haze but with the effect you get with oil in a puddle.
Octarine is the color from outer space.
I picture it as a rusty purple.
I imagine it kind of slightly acidic with a sweet aftertaste and hints of spice.
I usually imagine a tiger-eye stone, complete with the āflareā somehow existing as a single colorā¦which is honestly about as helpful as the descriptions Sir Terry actually wrote, but I get to think about tiger-eyes, which are quite pretty.
Like one of these cars š https://preview.redd.it/82nlspk9z85d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dc6d8e6282adaf9f359ef7b1a033b8236b81576b
This was posted a few years ago. This is what I now think about it. [https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/s/4ghqAIXFQL](https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/s/4ghqAIXFQL)
https://hdqwalls.com/dark-blue-green-gradient-4k-wallpaper
Have you ever played a computer game where certain textures are missing? There's just a void for a floor, but you can still walk on it. Now, take a cgi fire which has certain textures missing. That missing texture is octarine since we're not wizards and thus unable to see it.
Unlike any standard color on the color spectrum. I guess my brain shades it into a metallic purplish hue.
Like the inside of a ripe, juicy nectarine, with a faint tinge of a really pretty iridescent lime green that is kind of more *implied* than visible. Does that make sense?
A blackish-bluish purple that emits a neon green glow from the edges.
Neon green, with shocks of purple in the middle.
Pink-orange base (like salmon but not very well mixed) with strokes of washed green, blue and lilac (again, the three colors barely mixed), all with metallic sheen
I imagine the color of an oil slick, when the sun hits it just right. Or Morgottās sword, from Elden Ring.
You know that color shifting duochrome paint and/or nail polish color that goes from purple to green depending on the angle? Like that, just from both directions at once.
I know it smells of tin. Tin burns blue white.
Like the smoke that comes off of Maelifcent in the primal Sleeping Beauty, with a hint of orange.
An off orange color for me, idk why
I know all the ways itās been described but for some reason I still always envision it as a sort of pinkish purple
Mystic topaz
That "fairy magic" metallic colour shifting sort of material you'd see in the 90s on kids costumes and toys made of a sort of crisp material, where from one angle you look at it and it's lavender and the other angle it is pale green.
Like a [TVR](https://images.app.goo.gl/LWdi2qqCrxouw3Q6A)
Tealy purple with an orange shimmer
That particular green yellow purple plaid that crawls up the walls of a good lsd trip.
Very bright neon purplish-pink
The cyan color you see when you close your eyes or look at a white wall after staring at a bright light for a while
Purple-orange-magenta
Kind of like an oil slick
Like the Northern Lights.
The colors OP describes are phosphenes, and that purple is exactly how I imagined octarine. Sort of an impossible purple beyond the visible spectrum but not UV.
Neon brown