Time for a little lesson in color theory.

The image below appears to have spirals of green, blue, and pink/magenta – but what appears to be blue and what appears to be green are actually identical colors.

Don’t believe me? The squares below that image are taken from sample pixels.

What’s the reason for this trippy effect and why you were so certain that you were looking at stripes of green and stripes of blue? They look like different colors because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the “blue” spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the “green” one.