Why would darker colors absorb more heat energy then lighter colors?
To understand this you would have to first understand the spectrum of visible light. Colors look the way they do because visible light is a spectrum that contains several colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). When we see a color that means that all of the other colors in the spectrum have been absorbed and what is left is the color that is bounced back to us. For example, if you are wearing a green shirt, that means that red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, and violet are being absorbed, and green is being bounced to the eye. If it is a light green, then some of the yellow is also being bounced back. If a shirt is black then the entire spectrum is being absorbed and nothing is being bounced back to the eye… which makes it hotter to wear a dark color because all of that light also contains heat. If you are wearing a white shirt then it is cooler because the entire visible spectrum gets bounced back to the eye.
