Two of the primary reasons rainbow color maps are considered ineffective trace back to the idea that rainbow color maps implicitly discretize encoded data into hue-based bands, yet there is no research addressing what this discretization looks like or how consistent it is across individuals. In this talk, we will discuss an exploratory study designed to empirically investigate the implicit discretization of common spectral schemes and explore whether the phenomenon can be modeled by variations in luminance, chroma, and hue. The results suggest that three commonly-used rainbow color maps are implicitly discretized with consistency across individuals. The results also indicate, however, that this implicit discretization varies across different datasets, in a way that suggests the visualization community's understanding of both rainbow color maps and, more generally, effective color usage remains incomplete.