: Re: Colours of ultraviolet I need to write something from the perspective of a character who sees colours differently from humans, and in particular can see multiple shades of ultraviolet. This isn't

@Jamie945

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Kirk makes a good point in his answer, but I feel it is a little hidden so I would like to expand on it a bit.

A species who can see ultraviolet wavelengths, would likely have a different vocabulary for this.

Think about our color names: we have invented completely different words for the shades of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum we can see with our good old biological eyes: "red", "blue", "purple", "brown", "yellow" -- all those correspond to very narrow bands of wavelengths. By contrast, we basically group everything beyond that into two groups: below (infra)-red and above (ultra)-violet*.

It would make sense that species who can see some frequencies in the ultra-violet and have developed a language to describe colors would have assigned one or probably several different names to it - for example the "plaid" that Kirk mentions. Likely they would use these names in much the same way as we do: "that skirt is a beautiful dark-plaid" or "that's not plaid, that's purple!".

Since I am not really a writer -- consider this answer more a contribution from a world-building perspective -- I will limit my writing advice to this:

Use these colors as naturally as possible -- when writing a book from the human perspective you would not say "the flower was of a beautiful color that dogs cannot distinguish" but "the flower was red".
If you need to bring up the fact that some of these colors are ultraviolet you can either have an outside observer comment on it (e.g. how he cannot understand why they use two different names for the same shade of black), or if your world allows you can introduce a scientific viewpoint (e.g. a character commenting "oh yeah, your eyes have of course not evolved to see that wavelength).

Finally, note that you can also reverse the situation: perhaps there is fewer need to see red colors for this character, and in turn they can be surprised why humans are so enchanted by these boring roses.

*) Technically speaking there are some classes there as well, such as radio waves, micro-waves, X-rays, etc. - but they are mostly based on their application and much broader - literally - than "red".

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