Did you know that there’s actually biological science behind how two or more colors complement one another? I’m not an ophthalmologist or an optometrist, but I’ll try to translate the science here for simple folks like myself. Let’s start with color in general.

Colors Are Frequencies

An apple is red… right? Well, not really. The frequency of how light is reflected and refracted off of the surface of an apple makes it detectable, converted by our eyes as signals, and sent to our brain where we identify it as “red”. Ugh… that hurts my head just thinking about it. It’s true though… the color is simply a frequency of light. Here’s a view of the electromagnetic spectrum and each color’s frequencies:

This is exactly why white light pointed at a prism produces a rainbow. What’s really occurring is that the crystal is changing the frequency of the wavelength as the light is refracted:

The crystal prism disperses white light into many colors. Color Theory 101: Making Complementary Colors Work for You