In a small workshop in Seiffen that specializes in classic wooden toys, this yo-yo is turned, sanded, and varnished from sturdy beech wood. Many of the steps are done by hand, but the yo-yo is not hand-painted—and for good reason.

This is because applying the individual color panels requires a high degree of precision so that our brain interprets the sensory impression of the rotating colors red, green, and blue—RGB colors, the primary colors of the additive color space—as well as the black areas, as new colors. Thanks to the precisely designed lamination, when the yo-yo rotates, the individual color areas of the ray pattern merge before our eyes into uniform color stripes — arranged in complementary pairs, the colors cyan, magenta, and yellow—the primary colors of the subtractive color space—appear in addition to the RGB colors.

The handy RGB-Colors yo-yo is based on an idea from the Goethe Museum in Düsseldorf. In his theory of colors, Goethe focused on the subjective perception of colors. His theory that color perception must be judged primarily from an aesthetic perspective was refuted by modern physics—yet Goethe’s theory of colors is still recognized today in psychology, philosophy, and art.

At the time Goethe was developing his theory of colors, a veritable yo-yo craze swept across Europe. The poet himself is known to have taken great delight in the yo-yo, which he immortalized in his *Venetian Epigrams*: “What a delightful game! The disc winds along the string, / Having slipped from the hand, it hastens back up again! / Behold, it seems I cast my heart now to this beauty, now to that; / Yet at once it returns in a flash.”

Instead of using the yo-yo as a metaphor for Goethe’s erotic adventures, the Goethe Museum in Düsseldorf chose it for a playful experiment in color theory and, together with Swiss artist Andreas Hofer, developed the RGB-colored yo-yo. The design was based on Hofer’s RGB turntable, which is over one meter tall and has been on display at the Goethe Museum since 2005. The concept of the large turntable was adapted to the smaller surface of the yo-yo—so that you can now experience color mixing while playing with the yo-yo, very much in the spirit of Goethe, who wrote to his close confidant Johann Peter Eckermann about his theory of colors: “… as you know, it is not meant merely to be read and studied, but it is meant to be put into practice …”