It is possible to recognize each element visually by its spectrum. But how can anyone be familiar with all of them, when there are 98 elements with known visual spectra? In these pages, we'll categorize them and greatly simplify this memorization task by comparing similarities and pointing out differences. For best results, we recommend a 1920x1080 monitor resolution to view these pages.

This guide uses color names to describe the visual appearance of various spectral features. Color perception varies slightly from individual to individual, but people with normal color vision perceive wavelengths fairly consistently. Colors can appear different next to other colors, for example sodium yellow looks orange next to iron's mess of bright green lines, but the difference is small enough that generally we can assign color names to reference wavelengths and have the names be accurate most of the time.

Color names used in this guide, and their representative wavelengths, include:

Wavelengths from 700-800nm are considered far-red.