What color is a red dwarf star? I read recently that a red dwarf star might actually look white.   I realize there's a wide range in red dwarf surface temperature, 2,500 to 3,500 degrees K, compared to 5,778 for our Sun.   Metal at 2,500 degrees K is nearly white hot with just traces of yellow.   Is that true for 93% hydrogen 7% helium as well?   Would the color of red dwarf stars be closer to yellow/white rather than red based on our vision, if we were to be close enough to get a good look?
The spectrum is of course heavily weighted towards red wavelengths, but your answer is mainly to do with the physiology of the eye, not astrophysics.
This site has folded stellar spectra through the appropriate response and arrived at &quot;orange-ish&quot; for M-dwarfs.
A &quot;white-hot&quot; piece of metal is not really white. Sunlight appears white - a blackbody spectrum at around 5800 K. The composition doesn't play a great role, though the spectrum of heated pure metal is probably closer to a blackbody than is an M-dwarf. I suspect that when people talk about &quot;white hot metal&quot;, what is going on is the eye being overwhelmed by a large flux of photons. The intrinsic spectrum is clearly not that of a &quot;white&quot; object (such as sunlight). However, it could be that the emissivity is a bit lower in the red part of the visible spectrum so that when at least some green/blue light is produced (recall that the Wien tail is an exponential fall on the short wavelength side) that the eye's color sensory cells may be triggered sufficiently to fool it that the light is white. Either way that's physiology, not astrophysics.
Postscript: Most people can make out the orange-ish colour of M-type stars like Betelgeuse and Antares. These are (super)giants, but their spectra are not so different from M-dwarfs.