Riley Tranquillow

0x00FFFF & I
A Short Story

February 6, 2026.

A Short Lecture on Colors

Everyone has a favorite color of some kind. or at least they should. More often than not when I ask the question, I get an utterly useless answer: Black.

Let's get this out of the way, When I talk about colors, I usually mean that every value that can be represented in an RGBA color space is a color. So, Red? (0xFF0000FF). Brown? (0x674200FF). Therefore, Black (0x000000FF) and White (0xFFFFFFFF) are colors too. (this makes “nothingness” a color too (0xFFFFFF00), but oh well)

But usually, people say that black is their favorite color to dodge a question and intentionally spark an argument against other people that don't consider Black and White to be colors. Those other people aren't wrong; I was one too. After thinking about it, reframing the question “What's your favorite color?” was necessary. My favorite colors were always fully saturated, so that's what I naively expect from people as well, and why black always infuriated me a little. Therefore, the question “What's your favorite color” became:

What's your favorite hue?

Hue (H) is a property of the HSV (this is much easier to grasp than the other) or HSL color spaces - the Conical and Biconical transformations of the Cartesian RGB color space. It denotes the relative similarity to the primary colors - Red Green and Blue. In the polar H subspace, and they are put at 0˚, 120˚ and 240˚ respectively. and the linear combinations of each two primary color make up the rest (as long as one of the primary colors is at its maximum, otherwise you end up with not fully saturated colors). For example, the hue of the color Magenta is 300˚ as it's in the middle of blue and red. This way almost every color in the basic sense (where Black and White didn't count) have their own hue value.

The way that we can divide the H wheel to 360 degrees has its own benefits too:
12 divides 360. Each month of the year can have its own hue. This is also about the limit that each hue can have its own name, although that's stretching it:

You can see how Rose, Azure, Teal and Lime pad out the list? Well… It's not as bad as trying to find the in-between 15˚ intervals

See how I wasn't able to find a color for 225˚, and how 315˚ is wrong? that's what I mean.

My Favorite Color(s)

You are definitely asking what my favorite color is. I assume as you have read all my Color Theory 101 lecture.

It's Cyan. But it hasn't been this way.

2017, Yellow in 2018, Orange afterwards with a brief touch on Yellow in 2021, Yellow is such an underrated color.

Until 2025 it was this way. And why not? The spectrum from Red to Orange to Yellow was so smooth. The fact that Yellow hues seem brighter than Oranges makes a cool hack to add shading without sacrificing the saturation.

How did Cyan become my Favorite Color

It all started after [467] came into picture. Around January of 2025 memes of her alongside [401] started to clutter my Instagram FYP meanwhile some songs of her flared up in December, so I started taking interest in the color itself. That's when I realized just how many cyan things I've accidentally accumulated.

Look at Mikucon for instance. The color of its keyboard was not the deciding factor in 2018. I would've prefered a violet or an orange backlight instead. There's the current tupperware water bottle, which was the only one left after breaking two blue ones and a black 1L joint. There's the cyan suitcase, it was just mislabeled as a 22 incher instead of a 26, knocking ₺100 off the list price.

In short: [467].

What Makes Cyan underrated

Blue is a common color. especially its darker tones. Navy Blue as it's called, it's common to find in places where people want a heavy but not black tones (Grayscale or L is a good color spectrum too, it fits everything nicely). There's also the warmer Brown-Beige which are the desaturated tones of Orange but still. Blue is still common is someone wants a cool color pallette. I've always wondered how furniture and suits would look under other hues? Red and Rose (Violet and Magenta to a degree) are actually two good hues for women's dresses, give credit where it's due. We talked about brown. Yellow complements Brown but its own dark tones look like diarrhea. We've talked about Azure (this also looks blue) and Blue. This leaves us Cyan, Green and Teal.

Cyan looks like Blue but not at the same time. Its dark tones take in attention, unlike the banal Blue's dark tones, as there not that many dark Cyan tones out in the wild. As people think Blue is the mature color of the range, Cyan may be seen as the immature in comparison. We can take advantage of this fact. What makes things immature also makes them lively, fun and young - three advantages that Cyan has.

My Cyan Things

This list is not exhaustive as I think I have a lot more things that I go “Holy crap, is this Cyan too?”

  1. Mikucon
  2. A Tupperware water bottle
  3. My smaller suitcase
  4. An old notebook that I had
  5. Kingston Datatraveler Exodia 64GB
  6. My Phone case
  7. KBear Rosefinch (though this is more like Teal but that doesn't make it less [467])

When you have an underrated hue as your favorite, you tend to notice things of that. like the old metro trains of my city was of that color. Some of the seats and the stations still are!

Wrapping Up

Let's wrap this weird blogpost with my newest remark:

When you are interested in something, you tend to notice in life. Be it birds, flowers, phone models, maybe even colors.
The moral of this story is, look around. maybe your newest obsession is right in your nose.