Primary / secondary colors
The starting colors and the colors made by mixing them in pairs. Which hues count depends on whether you mean paint, light, or ink.
See it
What it is
Primary colors are the starting set in a chosen color model; secondary colors come from mixing pairs of those primaries. On the traditional artist RYB wheel, red, yellow, and blue produce orange, green, and violet. In additive RGB light, red, green, and blue produce yellow, cyan, and magenta. Piet Mondrian made the RYB primaries a signature of modernist painting.
Reach for these labels when teaching a mixing system, organizing a color wheel, or deliberately using the blunt energy of a primary palette. They describe relationships inside one model, not a permanent rank that certain named hues hold everywhere.
Gotcha: saying only 'the primaries' leaves out the important part. Paint classes usually mean RYB, screens mean RGB, and process printing starts from cyan, magenta, and yellow. Real pigments also mix imperfectly, so the classroom RYB wheel is a useful tradition rather than an exact model of subtractive color.
Ask AI for it
Build an interactive comparison of primary and secondary colors using CSS conic-gradient(). Show an RYB wheel with red, yellow, and blue primaries plus orange, green, and violet secondaries, then an RGB light wheel with red, green, and blue primaries plus yellow, cyan, and magenta secondaries. Label every pair that mixes into a secondary, add a toggle between the models, and never reuse CSS HSL hue angles as if they were RYB angles.