Cyan facts for kids

Cyan is a cool color that's right in the middle of blue and green on the color wheel. Think of it like a mix of blue and green. It's super important for inkjet printers, where it's one of the main ink colors, along with black, yellow, and magenta.

Cyan is also a secondary color of light, just like magenta and yellow. When you mix red, green, and blue light together, those are the primary colors of light. You can make cyan light by mixing green and blue light. Interestingly, cyan is the opposite of red on the color wheel.

How is Cyan Used?

Cyan in Printing and Screens

Cyan is a key color in the CMYK color model. This model uses Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (black) inks to create almost all the colors you see in printed books, magazines, and posters. When you look at a picture printed from an inkjet printer, you're seeing lots of tiny dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink.

For computer screens and TVs, colors are made differently using light. This is called the RGB color model, which stands for Red, Green, and Blue light. Cyan is made when green and blue light are mixed together on a screen.

Cyan in Nature and Art

You can see cyan in many places around you! It's often the color of shallow ocean water, especially over sandy areas. This happens because the water absorbs the red light from the sun, leaving behind the beautiful greenish-blue cyan color.

Cyan has also been used a lot in art and architecture, especially in places like Turkey and Central Asia. Many old buildings, like mosques, have domes and tiles decorated with lovely cyan colors.

Cyan in Everyday Life

Sometimes, you might see cyan in unexpected places. For example, surgeons and nurses often wear cyan-colored scrubs in operating rooms. One idea is that this color helps reduce the glare from bright lights and makes it easier to see red blood, though there isn't a lot of strong proof for this.

Also, old color photographs can sometimes turn a bit cyan over time. This happens because the different colors in the photo fade at different speeds.

Related pages

• List of colors
• Aqua
• Aquamarine
• Blue-green
• Electric blue
• Teal
• Turquoise
• Viridian

Images for kids

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  In the RGB color model, used to make colors on computer and TV displays, cyan is created by the combination of green and blue light.

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  Color printers today use, magenta, cyan and yellow ink to produce the full range of colors.

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  Cyan and red are contrasting colors. They have strong contrast and harmony, and if combined, they make grey.

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  Cyan is the color of shallow water over a sandy beach. The water absorbs the color red from the sunlight, leaving a greenish-blue color.

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  The dome of the Tilla Kari Mosque in Samarkand, Uzbekistan (1660) is cyan. The color is widely used in architecture in Turkey and Central Asia.

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  A surgical team in Germany. It has been suggested that surgeons and nurses adopted a cyan-colored gown and operating rooms because it is complementary to the color of red blood and thus reduced glare, though the evidence for this claim is limited.

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  The pigments in color photographs may degrade at different rates, potentially resulting in a cyan tint.

See also

In Spanish: Cian para niños