Light and Colour: What We Really See
When we see something that is dark, our understandable thought is that the thing lacks light. Conversley, when we see brightly coloured things – we assume they are full of light. Actually, if you consider the physics of light, the reality is the other way round. Dark things can be said to be full of light, while light things have very little light. Let’s dig into this.
Optics (the physics of light)
Light is composed of quantum entities called photons which act as both particles and waves (but that’s a story for another time when we start getting into quantum physics. When we look at an object, the colour the object appears is determined by the photons which have bounced off the object, into our eyes.
If an object appears light coloured, this is because all or most of the light that reached that object wasn’t absorbed, and instead bounced off. Your eyes are picking up those reflected photons, and we perceive the object as light in colour. What about objects that appear darker? Well, they do so because rather than reflecting large amounts of light, these objects absorb it. So the photons don’t bounce back and are instead taken in by the material. So our eyes can’t perceive much light, which is why the object appears dark.
Melanin and the Science of Skin
This brings us to skin, and specifically Black and brown skin. Eumelanin is the complex molecule that is responsible for the deep brown and black tones in human physiology. The higher the quantity of eumelanin in a person’s skin or hair the more light that skin absorbs.
Eumelanin is found in the top layer of the skin, the epidermis, and it has a unique ability to absorb a wide range of light. It’s especially effective at soaking up ultraviolet (UV) light, but it also absorbs violet, blue, and other high-energy wavelengths. That means that dark skin, rich in eumelanin, is actively receiving and absorbing light all day, every day.
By the way, you might be wondering what eumelanin actually does with all those photons. Does it simply consume them? Well, no. When eumelanin absorbs the light into its highly complex molecular structure, it changes that light into different forms of energy. Much of it is converted into heat energy and dissipated. It’s possible that eumelanin also converts light into different forms of energy, such a electrical energy. This is still a very new area of research as of 2025 so if you’re reading this years into the future, you probably know a lot more than I did here!
Full of Light, Not Lacking It
So my working concept about dark objects and especially dark skin is that they are actually full of light, from a scientific perspective. Black and brown skin absorbs and processes light constantly, converting this light energy into other forms, which we’re only just beginning to learn about. In contrast, very light-coloured skin reflects most light and absorbs very little. While it might look bright to us, in reality, less light is being held within it.
Understanding this flips the old assumptions. Dark skin doesn’t hide from the light. It interacts with it deeply, intelligently, and powerfully.
