I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.
I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.
As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
The biggest problem here is that people have wildly uncalibrated monitors that often have color cast tints. I color calibrate my monitors and even my factory calibrated MacBook has a slight green tint.
People should also do hue differentiation tests like this one to see if they have any color deficiency: https://www.xrite.com/hue-test
That’s way more interesting.
Is my "520 nm green" actually your "635 nm red"? And vice versa?
Are all of our color embeddings different despite the same g-protein coupled biochemical activation?
If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?
There's a philosophical school of thought (which I share) that there's no coherent definition.
I would assume we don’t, simply because nerves are reproduced biologically, but I’m not a neuroscientist.
This, it commonly gets reposted on reddit and the colorblind sub, but it's basically worthless because most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green and forcing them to choose one or the other doesn't give you any valuable information.
You need to get into either fishing (chartreuse lures are common) or cocktails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) .
(I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)
I still refuse to believe that purple and violet are different colors.
Like, I'd be interested to see if where my boundaries between blue and cyan, or cyan and green, are compared to the rest of the population.
But there's a whole other color between blue and green! A color that is primary under the subtractive CMYK model.
And it's an even bigger difference than with orange, because while red and yellow are 60° apart on the color wheel so that orange is 30° from each, blue and green are a full 120° apart on the color wheel, with cyan being 60° from each. So it's actually even worse -- it's as bad/nonsensical as showing yellow and asking if yellow is red or green.
Also, as it happens, I feel like cyan is just not really in our everyday vocabulary if you’re assigning colors to everyday objects. Maybe it’s because it’s rare to see something truly that bright and saturated. I feel like in practice I would end up just saying “blue-green” more than cyan, turquoise, teal, etc.
Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.
Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.
I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
Blue his house
With a blue little window
And a blue Corvette
And everything is blue for him
And himself and everybody around
'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen (to listen)
For this, you just lost The Game.
If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
:/
If you're going to go with linguistic self-report and a single item, you really want something like an 11-point Likert scale. A smart design might get e.g. a person's rating of "blue-ness vs. green-ness" on an 11-point scale, then determine the optimal cutpoint via e.g. clustering, logistic regression, or some other method, to really get something meaningful.
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange. * Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.
For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about azzurro (galazio (γαλάζιο) in Greek; kachol (כחול) in Hebrew). Is azzurro its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise#Names
If a language/culture does not have a word for "blue" does that mean the colour does not exist?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...
Where does "white" end and "grey" begin? Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_gray
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_black
Also, a bit of fun with brown:
> Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
No, it's a different word for it.
> Where does "white" end and "grey" begin?
When any amount of black is added to white.
> Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?
When the color is 100% black.
White and black are not the same as red, green, or blue. Tinting or shading a color with white or black does not change the color, it lightens or darkens it. That's not the same for RGB. Combining those results in other colors, regardless if a culture has a specific name for it.
But what does this mean? Only vantablack is black, everything else is grey?
For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.
A server error has occurred
FUNCTION_INVOCATION_FAILED
sfo1::qcpj5-1777386477345-b792e22509f4In the developer console I see a CORS error for an attempt to load an SVG component from a CDN; I wonder if the dev pushed out a bad update
"Alice is in Denver. Is Alice in (a) Canada or (b) Mexico?"
- Your boundary between Canada and Mexico is at 40° latitude, more southern than 53% of the population.Rather than asking "Is this blue or green?", it's "Does this look more blue to you, or more green to you?"
Because then your analogy becomes "Is Alice closer to Canada or Mexico?"
Denver is teal, the USA blue-green. Canada is Blue, and Mexico is green.
Their analogy is pretty on point.
Countries are not a continuum, they start and end at some specific line defined by constitutions, mutually agreed by neighbours (or disputed through war and diplomacy) Colours have no such incentive for strict unified definitions, so there is no point at which blue ends.
IIRC from when I moved to Japan the first time (30+ y ago) when the old lights were standard, being a wildly curious Gaijin enough to ask "why" about these kinds of strange contradictions, and having lots of exposure in that time to senior citizens who had the spare time and inclination to humor my incessant questions, several of these octogenarian to centarians remembered the introduction of the first gen traffic lights, when the automobile became common enough to require them; and this seeming contradiction was new; this was the explanation I have heard common across several distinct conversations in different towns:
1. 緑 "midori" as a character and word for green was not very common usage before the end of WWII.
2. The (pre-LED) lamps for all three were yellow bulbs viewed through glass filters that were 'red', 'clear-somewhat yellow', and 'blue' - so even though it may appear green, the blue was for the color of the glass.
Also because 青い "aoi" has persisted in use for certain shades of 'green' - for example green apples and leafy fresh veggies; so this 'blue' seems to match the actual color of the light and has an implicit meaning for Japanese - in the sense of 'go while light is still fresh' - and Japanese humor is primarily Punny instead of being actually Funny, so this double meaning resonates even after switching to truly green LED light sources.
For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"
But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha
Even if aqua is neither more green or more blue, wouldn't it be interesting if when given the choice, the outcome leans toward green or blue to a statistically significant degree? or perhaps that there are differences in how it's perceived based on measurable factors like geography, wealth, height, weight, etc?
Collecting data is how we learn, and discover new things. Even if it seems dumb to you.
ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)
But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!
"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.
At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?
Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.
My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.
Look into aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), anendophasia (lack of inner voice).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Is it the Rp2000 and Rp50000 that get mixed up? They seem obvious in that picture but it might be harder to tell them apart in low light.
The added complexity is their currency is like paper, so it wears, fades, tears, and marks. Furthermore, there are so many zeroes. Their sizes are all identical or similar. Different generations of the notes are in use, some better than others. Indonesians also use "," as the decimal indicator, and "." as the thousands separator; in practice, both are intermixed with no sense or reason, sometimes even in the same paragraph, even on banking websites <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Indonesian/Lessons/Number...>, often due to misconfigured locale settings on computers (expect to see red spellcheck underlines on everything on Indonesian office computers).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Indonesian_ru...>
<https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.a04f7812fd4ef0b773c7b081206bc28c...>
<https://img.freepik.com/premium-photo/new-rupiah-issued-2022...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/WC177J/a-pile-of-crumpled-indonesi...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/D17MR1/background-of-indonesia-mon...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/JN9ANB/close-up-picture-of-indones...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2CXNYGJ/indonesia-money-isolated-b...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2KBJ4H6/semarang-indonesia-novembe...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2T13B4R/stock-photo-of-indonesian-...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2R5K0NE/new-series-of-rupiah-bankn...>
I like to think this may have had something to do with them having both blue and green in their political usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue
I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.
Seem to get ~172.
A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.
my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess
crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
I had actually a very hard time to answer the questions, needed to overlay most of the color with some mostly white / light gray window and only squint at the color around it to decide. In the end my result was 176, which is almost the exact turning point for most people (and that even while my monitor is set to be more cold than default; but like said I had whatever my monitor shows as "white" to compare; even that "white" is likely technically slightly blue-ish).
Color perception is anyway much more influenced by contrasts then anything else. (Likely similar to acoustic tones, which are very hard to name / locate absolutely than when comparing to some reference tone.)
Besides the things mentioned in the about popup, blue is AFAIK the color we have the most receptors for. So it's imho quite "natural" that most people perceive cyan—which is technically the exact middle—as blue-ish, and of course the color left to it, turquoise, is green-ish (and as it seems, for most people, the mentioned turning point).
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...
I think the intent here is clear in context.
Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.
I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.
The Cambridge Rugby blue which pre-dates the Boating blue is also more properly blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_University_R.U.F.C.
Orange is its own color, but is this hue it 51% red or 51% yellow?
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
I got 80 which is close enough, I think it’s really only the extremes that are meaningful. I tried simply alternating green-blue etc and got 60. I think adding some randomness and taking more samples (more questions) would help - I was worried that the prior color left a residual effect as a relative comparison was easier than absolute comparison. The extra random samples could help give an idea of confidence in that middle zone.
In Dutch it's called "appelblauwzeegroen" (apple-blue sea-green, yes it's weird) so it's not surprising either that my wife sees it as green I guess.
But with both eyes I got
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
I should test with one eye.
Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.
If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
First I shifted the app to use P3 `oklch(.7066 .1611 $hue)` with range (150..210) centered on cyan at 180°, same as sRGB. No change, so it's not some sort of artifact of colorspaces. Then I upped it to 16 steps instead of 8. The window narrowed slightly, but the same first-then-the-rest shift kept happening. Finally I raised the random color static mask duration from 200ms to 5000ms. Scored 180 +/- 1. Huh. Makes sense, given the image persistence stuff I deal with.
So, for those seeing that same variability I'd recommend editing that first (local response override index-blah.js, search `, 200` replace `, 5000` by hand, reload page) to get a more stable result.
My job was to find odd things on a one third section of a side of beef as it went past and cut it off. 1500 or so per day.
The test showed numbers created with blobs of close colours.
The last test didn't have a number in it.
Cheeky buggers.
When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.
If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.
My question is: - I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there? - If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-h...
I have a colorblindness simulator on my computer called Sim Daltonism and when I use that on the color wheel, it does indeed appear to have white, desaturated lines radiating from the center at those three angles. In the simulator, the one at 11:00 is the strongest, followed by 3:00, and the 7:00 one is faintest. My hunch is that the perceptually uniform color space samples you're looking at have more uniform brightness, so those boundaries blend in to the surrounding colors better. They look nicer to me too -- they still represent saturated, composite colors like teal, but just at a pleasant, harmonious brightness. It's very interesting to compare perception!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.
No idea why
Well... uhm, you may want to verify that claim.
However, I know enough about perception to know that this called for some hacking.
So as soon as I saw the second color I realized I needed to look at something else. So each time after choosing and seeing the next color I looked around quite a bit, inside and through the windows at the outside (I happen to be in a Hawaii, so blues and greens are abundant) before choosing and I noticed significantly different color perception after looking around, specifically, I had more confidence in whether it was blue or green.
I can imagine if you just stare at the colors and try to power through, you might get kinda irritated.
Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?
--Edit--
My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:
> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
For you, turquoise is green."
Took it 3 times (90%, 85%, 87%). At least, I now know why sometimes I'm surprised that people call green things blue :)
To be honest, there should have been a "neither" category, because that was frustrating to classify a color that is clearly neither. But I understand the need for a binary choice for this experiment.
Turquoise `#40E0D0 ` feels green to me, while Dark Turquoise `#00CED1` , I can agree to consider as blue.
Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
No, turquoise is turquoise!!1
Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
I noticed that what I was actually seeing later on was 'is this more blue or green than the last colour' due to my eyes adjusting to the previous screen and just seeing the difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
* HDR vs SDR mode
* Different monitors have different color replication ranges
* Monitor and OS color and brightness controls (brightness affects color perception)
* Interior lighting
* Monitor technology (LCD, OLED, etc)
Meaning even if a color was meant to be X, it just won't appear that way given the combinations above.
Yeah, so to me, tortoise is definitely blue.
Edit: typo tortoise -> turquoise
I have UV filters on my glasses and things really changed when I took them on of off. I was much greener with the UV filtering glasses on. I guess my eyes are not picking up on things somehow.
very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
This has nothing at all to do with colour perception, or, if actual differences in perception are involved, this test fails to distinguish those from individual differences in assignment to linguistic categories.
EDIT: To actually test something like this, you need to make an assumption that cannot easily be tested or supported by evidence.
E.g. say we could all agree that, generally, blue + orange is a more pleasant pairing than blue + green. One might then imagine a series of images using orange + varying interpolations between blue and green, with the prompt being "is this combination of colours more or less aesthetically pleasing than the last". The average cutpoint could then be interpreted as a subjective judgement of where e.g. teals become "more blue", from an aesthetic / complementary standpoint. But this test does nothing of the sort.
No, turquoise is turquoise. You gave me two options, and you act like I didn't know that word exists
Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.
Pretty sure I accidentally picked blue for a green once.
It needs to interpolate between blue and green in the CIELAB color space.
Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
Still an interesting experiment, but I would be cautious about drawing conclusions about anything from it.
isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.
It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.
It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.
"Is it blue" ?
No clown, learn colors
The data remains available. It was a TidyTuesday ("social data project") for 2025-07-08.[4] This response[5] looked at TFA. (This week's TT is ag tariffs.[9])
I just did a quick and sloppy search, so there's likely more out there. Curiously, I found AIMode and Bing/chat less immediately helpful than I'd have guessed.
Years ago I used the xkcd data for a prototype web interactive for kids, which shader filtered video to selected colors... but it was overlapping rather than a partition, and I'd never leave out cyan. Hmm, maybe a vibe coding target.
[1] https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ [2] https://www.datapointed.net/2010/06/xkcd-color-name-strata/ [3] https://luminoso.com/the-color-cloud-an-interactive-visualiz... [4] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat... [5] https://jofrhwld.github.io/blog/posts/2025/07/2025-07-09_col... Off topic: [9] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat...
I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.
I want to say that shifted my score a lot. But every time I play I get a pretty different score, even on the same screen calibration. So, uh...
Problem is that it asks to categorize colors that to me are neither blue nor green
Like forest green olive green. navy blue.
Also maybe the full color spectrum. And a select set of colors to pick from.
There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.
EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue
