Why is Water Colourless?

Milk is white. Lemonade is cloudy. Orange juice is orange. Pretty much everything you drink or eat has some color. Then why is that you can see through a glass full of water? Why is water colorless Have you ever wondered?

Here is why. You must already know that white light is made up of several colors. Now anything solid or liquid is made up of tiny particles. Now when light falls on these particles, they absorb some colors from the light and while some other color doesn’t get absorbed. This color gets reflected back from the particles and is the one that reaches our eyes. The thing therefore appears to be of the color that is reflected back and reaches our eyes. For example when you look at orange juice, all colors from the light are absorbed except orange color. Orange color is reflected back and reaches our eyes and therefore the juice looks orange.

Water is colorless and transparent because ALL except a tiny bit of blue (for pure water) are reflected back. Since water reflects all colors together it looks colorless.

Credit: Thanks to Dave Nelson and Claude we updated this post with what is scientifically correct. We apologize for the error in our post.

What’s popular

We’d love to hear from you!

Could you spare a few seconds to provide valuable feedback on your Kinooze experience?

Click on this link to share your thoughts.

Posted

September 9, 2012

Facts For Kids, Science

Kinooze Learning

Comments

10 responses to “Why is Water Colourless?”

Claude

December 19, 2014

Water is colourless because it does not absorb much of any light we can see.

Kids, you can check this by yourselves: put something of colour behind a glass of water. You will see its colour perfectly, just the same as when light goes through air.
Dave Nelson

December 19, 2014

If water absorbed ALL colours, then it would be black.
Jasmine

July 16, 2015

I have a question. When water reflects all colors of light, it appears colourless. What about white substance? When all colours of light travel together, they appear white. Then does that mean white substance reflect all colours of light? What causes the difference between being colourless and white?
Rajeeb khan

January 13, 2016

absolutely right
Shweta

January 16, 2016

Water lets light to pass through it. Hence, it appears ‘transparent’ and colourless. Whereas, an ‘opaque’ white object will reflect all the frequencies of light together. Hence, the object appears white (and not colourless like water).
Anitha

January 19, 2016

I’ll make it more clear.The water in sea contains some amount of salts such as copper sulfate which absorb all the red yellow and orange shades leaving behind slight green and more of blue color that is reflected by the sea.Thus water in sea looks blue. Coming to glass water, it usually contains pure consumable water which does not have the salts that sea water has and hence it does not absorb any color in particular and reflect all the colors together in equal proportion,making it look colorless. It is as simple as that!
priya

May 23, 2016

Only it happens with water ???
Kay Kay

October 2, 2017

But why is it clear??
Muhammad Shuraim

January 30, 2018

I have a question:
That is when water reflects all the light then how we can see he objects when these are drowned in the water?
Munia

November 21, 2021

But if it reflects all the colours then it should look white. Because we know which substance reflects all the colours, it looks white. But water is colorless. It’s strange!