The following is a very poor description of how color vision and paint color works. Almost nothing you’ll ever experience outside of lasers and LEDs have narrow

The following is a very poor description of how color vision and paint color works. Almost nothing you’ll ever experience outside of lasers and LEDs have narrow light emission peaks around a single wavelength. Everything has a spectrum of color and trichromat vision splits these spectrums into three slightly overlapping bins with their own spectrum response. The colors you see do not map to frequency. They’re all synthetic based on the biology of your eyes. Plus if the nonsense about activating two cones is right, why not activate three and paint them white? The yellow they picked is just bright and has a lot of contrast against more or less everything in the environment because there aren’t many big yellow things around… and they picked a color that is quite loud but also not very obnoxious like a neon yellow would be… just slightly muted while still standing out. > “The yellow is not pure spectral yellow,” says Ivan Schwab, clinical spokesperson at the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “The best way to describe [the color] would be in wavelength,” says Schwab. The wavelength of the popular school-bus color is “right smack in the middle” of the peak wavelengths that stimulate the photoreceptor cells our eyes use to perceive red and green. The red and green photoreceptor cells, or “cones” as they are commonly known, are the two most predominant cones in our eyes. Schwab says, “If you get a pure wavelength of one color…and you hit just one cone with it, you’re going to have x amount of transmission of signal to the brain. But if that [wavelength] were to stimulate two cones, you’ll get double the amount of transmission to the brain.” Remarkably, “That color that we are calling school bus yellow hits both peaks equally.” So although they may not have fully comprehended the science behind it, the color Cyr and his colleagues chose at the 1939 conference makes it hard for other drivers to miss a school bus, even in their peripheral vision. “And it’s darned big,” Schwab adds.