As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.
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.
People are freaking out about this test like it’s some judgement of their character or something. I just picked “green” or “blue” without thinking.
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
> 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.
Even if anyone actually calibrated their screens, many cheap monitor panels are so shitty the calibration can’t help. I bought two 4K LG monitors at the same time and based on serial numbers, they’re likely from the same batch but LG likes to mix panels on their cheaper products. They have wildly different color spaces to the point where one swallows several points of grayscale*, which means I have to use the right monitor when viewing sites otherwise I lose the subtle gray-on-white that designers love so much.
I'd love to see a photograph of a 32 bit greyscale gradient on both. I wonder if some monitors with similar issues would not be able to represent the photograph properly.
You can do it on Linux but you need to buy a device you attach to your monitor. I have a Spyder X Pro but there are others.
It’s like $200 and it’s not worth it unless you do color sensitive work (photo editing, printing or video editing) and you have an expensive monitor or expensive laptop with good color support. Many monitors will fail so badly the calibration won’t be able to fix it.
But if you’ve ever had a lot of trouble trying to get colors to match when printing or between devices, it could be a godsend, although it’s only one of the many reasons colors might not match.
I wonder if photo stores might have the device, and if they would loan it. I'm surprised there is no method of calibration against common objects of known colour, such as Euro bills.
While "orange" did not exist as a single word in most languages, already in Old English or even in Latin or Ancient Greek one could find mentions about things that were "red-yellow".
Moreover, in ancient languages there were very few words that designed just a color, with no other meaning for the word, but it was very frequent to use words derived from the names of various things, which meant "of the color of the X thing".
For instance it was frequent to say that some things were "of the color of fire". Most likely this was intended to say that they were orange. For red objects one would have said "of the color of blood", while for yellow objects one would have said "of the color of sulfur" or "of the color of gold". "Of the color of saffron" is also likely to have meant "orange", though saffron may have many hues, from reddish to yellowish, depending on how it is prepared.
> Moreover, in ancient languages there were very few words that designed just a color, with no other meaning for the word, but it was very frequent to use words derived from the names of various things, which meant "of the color of the X thing".
Isn't this how things are still today? For example "orange".
Other languages draw those boundaries in different places. For example, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are separate basic color terms (goluboy vs. siniy), so asking a Russian speaker to collapse those into a single category would feel just as wrong as collapsing orange into red or yellow does to us.
Cyan isn't a basic color term in English. So yes, the test is basically asking: if you had to assign this color to one of the basic English categories, what would it be?
The frustration you're describing is kind of the point. With something like orange, English gives us a clear category, so "rounding" feels wrong. With cyan, it doesn't, so people end up splitting it differently.
The person you were responding to said that cyan feels like a completely different color to them, neither green nor blue. I had the same reaction when it gave me a color that I immediately identified as teal, and I learned my colors as a monolingual english speaker in Ohio. Therefore the supposition that all English speakers see only blue or green is an oversimplification.
Thanks, this seemed obvious to me too. But I would add, this could apply to orange too - there are a lot of orange tones between yellow and red, and if you likewise wanted to determine your subjective boundary, which this is only about, you would be able to say "rather red for me" or "rather yellow for me", regardless of the intermediate color. Since the space of colors can be described as convex, so to speak, you can between every two arbitrary colors determine your subjective decision boundary, regardless of any color in between. The premise is just accepting to ignore those colors.
The current use of "cyan" for blue-green is a modern confusion caused by people who have used Greek words without bothering to check their true meaning.
In Ancient Greek, "cyan" was blue, not blue-green. More precisely, it was the color of the pigment "ultramarine blue", which has remained widely used until today. The name of this pigment was already used by the Hittites, long before the Greeks.
An example of a Latin author who distinguished consistently green, blue-green and blue in many places is Pliny the Elder.
Blue was referred to as the color of the sky or the color of the blue pigments used in painting, like ultramarine blue.
Green was referred to as "green like grass", "green like tree leaves" or "green like emeralds".
Blue-green was referred to as "green like the littoral sea", "green like turquoise" or "green like beryls".
This is especially obvious in the discussion about emeralds and beryls, which are identical but for their color, the former being green and the latter blue-green.
Similarly, in Latin "red" was used for both red and purple, but the two colors were distinguished as "red like crimson dye" (beetle-based dye) and "red like purple dye" (snail-based dye).
Someone has downvoted this, despite the fact that what I have written is not an opinion, but just facts.
Because I have seen on HN extremely frequently downvotes that just show that the downvoters are ignorant about what they downvote. I stopped a long time ago to downvote comments.
Now I either upvote when I agree and otherwise I write a comment explaining why I disagree.
It would have been better if others had followed such a policy.
Perhaps the downvoter had something to say about "cyan", but this is indeed only one example of a long list of Ancient Greek words that have been borrowed into English during the 19th and 20th century, but which are used with incorrect meanings. Most likely this is due to the fact that those who have introduced these words did not study the Ancient Greek language and they also did not consult anyone knowledgeable or any good dictionaries. Another example of this kind is "macro" used as an opposite for "micro", i.e. as "big", while the true opposite of "micro" is "mega" = "big", while "macro" means "long", the opposite of "short" ("brachy" in Ancient Greek).
It is not an incorrect meaning, it is that meaning of the word in English is different. What it meant in ancient Greek or in 1805 is not relevant to what it means today.
Words meanings shift over time in all languages. And when languages take sounds from other languages, they also regularly shift their meanings.
There is no doubt that confusions are the origin of these English words.
It is extremely unlikely that any of those who introduced these words in English chose intentionally to use them for other things than for what they had been used for millennia.
For a modern user, it is no longer a confusion to use such words in their currently widespread sense. When speaking to others, I also use such words with their current meaning, in order to be understood.
Nevertheless, it is good to know their original meanings, especially when reading older texts, which may use those meanings. I have seen a lot of ridiculous claims about texts written in the Antiquity, or even about some texts written a couple of centuries ago, where those who had read those texts had been mislead by believing that the words had the same meaning as in modern English.
Especially about the colors known by ancient people, e.g about the Ancient Greeks, there have been many fantastic theories, e.g. that the Ancient Greeks did not know blue or brown, when already in the Iliad of Homer there are a lot of instances of words meaning "blue" (= "the color of the ultramarine blue pigment") or "brown" (= "the color of burnt wood").
>As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.
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.
>For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all!
That's sorta not true, it's just a quirk of language development. If they only have one word that covers both, they use additional words to describe the actual shade they're talking about.
Of these, the only language that I know a bit about, in Chinese 青 (blue/green) is the older word and nowadays used less than the more modern 蓝 (blue) and 绿 (green), but actually 青 is still used a lot in specific phrases, and I prefer to think of it as the "colour of things in nature" - so a blue sky would be 青, a blue/green sea would be 青 and a field of lush grass would also be 青. That aspect also comes through in how it's used metaphorically, in the senses of youth or vitality.
This is the same character that's used for Japanese traffic lights when foreigners find it funny that they call obviously green lights "blue".
The latter tests were all a bit pointless because they were just turquoise, and all looked much the same - a mix of blue and green, so I was pretty much answering based on whether it was bluer or greener than the previous image.
The results said "Your boundary is at hue 179, bluer than 82% of the population. For you, turquoise is green." and definitely if I was judging the boundary on a gradient, I'd have placed the line a bit further to the right.
Yes, very annoying, we know from extensive work in psychometrics that single-item, binary / forced-choice items produce junk responses that are heavily contaminated with response styles (answer in most socially-desirable way, select closest response to mouse/finger, select same response as last time, select random response, etc). Just give people an out ("Diagree with the question / premises", "Prefer not to answer", "Unsure / Can't decide", etc) and make sure you have e.g. a 5-7 point Likert-type scale for multiple items, or up to an 11-point scale for single items.
This kind of site / demo does none of the above, and so can't even be trusted for directional effects (the direction of response may simple be due to the type of people responding, etc).
I was having a discussion closely related to this recently because of my background in philosophy of language. Languages are functional, but not rigid. The rules and referents of "blue" become kind of pointless around the edges, and narrow words like cyan or turquoise -- even words borrowed from other languages -- are more functional. This is exaggerated further when the functionality becomes very important, which is where technical jargon starts to come into play. Languages should useful to the speaker; they do not define the constraints of the speaker. "Blue" is useful for the average English speaker, but completely useless for a graphic designer.
For different brains, the answer has to be no because the images you see are a "neural net" construction and if that neural net differs then the "image" you see is different
My daughter was watching Blue's Clues. They were doing color combinations (red + blue = purple, yellow + blue = green, etc). They then also did a further step, blue + green = cyan, and did green + yellow = chartreuse. Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.
I think using violet as a name for the entire color-range around (~128, 0, 255) is also common. So in a sense purple is an element of the violet color-range. But as points they are distinct. I think purple is more specific - as a color-range it'd cover less area.
Cyan isn't between green and blue, at least not completely. If you take green and blue, you won't be able to represent a good chunk of cyan hues. It feels greenish and blueish, but is neither, and is broader than any combination of the two, which is partly why some bright cyan objects (like the bird eggs on Wikipedia) look kind of unnaturally intense. Those eggs are a bright, slightly blue-leaning cyan.
That went from a fun, interesting experience, to wondering if this is how SCP 3125 was going to get me, as the entire screen seemed to become a wild glowing green long after the animation likely ended.
funny thing is that I would have said cyan was blue going into this, but the outcome had me classifying the boundary at "more blue than 93% of the population" -- meaning that I classed cyan as green when asked, without even remotely questioning it.
Except you can reject the very (stupid) question / framing, in which case, the response is to either close the tab, or respond in a particular response style, neither of which makes the data more informative. This kind of clumsy stuff is just dumb with what we know now, edutainment distraction for the HN crowd.
There was a time when there were no separate names for blue and green in the Japanese language. Some languages right now have concepts of fundamental colors like navy blue and light blue, where English rolls it into a single "blue". Naming colors is highly cultural and changes over time. The idea that colors have boundaries is fascinating from both psychological as well as linguistic perspectives.
The framing seems stupid if you take the naive perspective that your language's way of dividing colors is the only valid one. Exercises like this and discussions that follow help expand perspectives.
I have no idea when the words entered the languages, but I find it quite interesting that the color Orange in Thai is literally the color of the fruit (สีส้ม) whereas in Hungarian it is the same fruit as a shade of yellow (narancssárga).
That's very funny to have my exact reaction present in the first comment, I was thinking "that's turquoise" but I do also feel like turquoise is green, like you'd call the Copenhagen copper domes green, and the word verdigris comes from green
There are no "cyan-receptors" on your retina so it's not a cultural thing, it's a bio-physics one.
Plus as many mentioned the calibration of you display has propably a way higher impact on this than anything else.
I mean, that's the whole point of this exercise. In reality there is no hard line between green and blue, and if you make someone pick, their line is going to be entirely subjective, and different than others.
That's like saying there's no hard line between e.g. white and gray, or even white and black if we take it to an extreme. And that is accurate, if you slowly shift between the two then people will claim a transition at slightly different points, but it's entirely meaningless because it's (getting back to the blue/green example) not like anybody is going to insist 'no that's blue!' or 'no that's green!' It's obvious that it's intentionally ambiguous and so any pick at such a point is going to be largely arbitrary with little attachment held by anybody.
Actually people will definitely insist on "no that's blue" or "no that's green." My husband and I have frequent disagreements about a specific shade of blue/green. I think it's blue. He thinks it's green.
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.
Not only that but once you pick green or blue it's going to skew your results in that direction. I got a higher level of blue as my result but it's only because that's what I picked since I had to pick one of them.
I’m aware of cyan, of course, but it never occurred to me while doing this quiz, because the point was clearly to choose between blue and green. Of course there’s cyan, turquoise, teal, sky blue, etc., but the point is to make the potentially difficult choice between only blue and 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.
> As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
Just as all other modern schooling, the teaching of colors is done deliberately order to dumb down children and starve them from their natural ability to learn.
A child will learn at least dozens, if not hundreds of colors, if they are allowed to and taught. This has a real impact, because unless you learn this, it can be very difficult as an adult to be able to actually see the difference between colors.
But instead idiots make toys with only simple prime colors, and even playgrounds. Even though children themselves prefer more diverse and interesting color schemes.
Although after a few dozen color names, I think children are more benefitted by learning more about color theory such as physical paint mixing, digital mixing like RGB and HSL, and physical light effects on colours.
I would struggle to have to choose between only the words "red" and "yellow" to describe orange colours. Except for the orange fruit. I'm happy calling those yellow.
It's almost like color is a spectrum of light and we just arbitrarily slice it and decide "this has a name" because we are finite being who demand order from things that are not ordered and then demand further order from that order and get REALLY mad.
The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!
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?
Not a native speaker, bleen for me got auto corrected by my brain to green. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but I'd prefer grue because my brain will immediately understand we're talking about the umbrella term. If grue is said out of context, I'd imagine Gru from despicable me, when written I'd imagine gruel, but, again, because I'm not a native speaker, instead of yucky food I'd instead think about that episode of Masha and the Bear where they end up with a houseful of the porridge.
In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
That’s amusing because I am the converse: my boundary is bluer than 98% of the population. To a first approximation, blue is a very specific thing and all the other colors appear strongly non-blue to me. I do wonder where this preference came from, but it explains all the puzzling interactions between my wife and I over the years.
My boundary is also greener than 95% of the population. I think it's because I mentally separate cyan from green and blue, but still see cyan as a shade of blue. If you asked me what color it was without forcing green or blue, I'd have answered cyan on most of them.
...I get different numbers depending on which eye I use, but both are fairly center. I didn't expect blue-green to be affected though! My left eye can't see certain shades of red as well as my right eye. Bright sunlight makes it more noticeable, but my own skin looks weirdly (sickly) yellowish with one eye and normal with the other.
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. ;)
...I never found another person with the same experience. Here we are. For me though, it's not that sunlight makes it more noticeable, it's that I will see the same shades until I've had too much sunlight—eventually my left eye gets tired, I guess, and sees a lot less red than my right eye. After sleeping it resets and I see the same shade in both eyes.
Maybe i should talk to a researcher about this..
I had the same discussion with the color of a river in Albania with my wife. The test says my boundary is a bluer than 85% of the pop - sounds about right!
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)
I have this with a coat, but it's blue vs gray. Would be interesting to generalize this tool not just for other colours, but for other colour properties like saturation not just hue.
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
Huh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
yeah I've always thought of cyan as just "blue, but really bright", which does make sense - you're going from 0, 0, 100 (blue) to 0, 100, 100 (cyan) so it's twice as far from pure black. I also see pure cyan as being much more blue than green.
How would you feel about a test for "teal or blue" or "teal or green?" You still need to make binary choices, just along different boundaries. Would it make any difference?
If you gave me the exact same color code 20 times I might give you green 10 times and blue the other 10 because I genuinely can't tell the difference. So it's not a binary like you're claiming.
But reproducibility should be the point. As a result of the structure it approaches an asymptote from one side or the other. I took it once and approached from green and my greenness was 77%, a second time it approached from blue and my blueness was 68%.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
>correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. I understand that there's a continuum in reality, but psychologically, I still tend to perceive each shade as discretely either blue or green, especially when the shade is presented in isolation. Words like "teal", "cyan", etc. aren't really part of my normal vocabulary and to the extent that they are, I would think of them as subsets of blue or green, not disjoint sets.
I think the test can be fairly criticised on the basis that it is assuming everyone's psychological colour space has a discrete boundary between blue and green, which clearly isn't the case for some people (like you), but it is for others (like me).
It's so remarkable how many people here refuse to understand your point. It's like, there is no right or wrong, no perfect score, just pure subjectiveness, and they can't handle it. If I wasn't convinced this site is entirely bots before, I might be now....
It is enlightening to see who has been fixed on math proofs as testing and who has been exposed to observational testing. Seems many people have been brain washed into the former, forgetting the latter exists.
But that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception or vision, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).
Agreed, there is no clear premise. Of course that different people looking at the same object will use different colour words is a triviality that anyone over, say, 10 years old knows. If that's the premise of the site, it is boring. People are getting excited because they think this implies something about differences in vision or perception... but it doesn't, that requires much more cleverness to test.
It’s not really the same, because black and white strongly connote being at the far ends of their continuum (lightness), and are thus opposites, whereas blue and green are more vaguely specified as nearby spots on their continuum (hue).
It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
I don't know if there are people who treat turquoise and aqua as distinct, but I certainly treat them as distinct from blue (azure, cobalt) and green. Several of the colors around the mid range in the linked page are not colors I would use the words "blue" or "green" for. That doesn't mean that I have strict rules here; I don't actually know if I would call what you call "cyan" turquoise or blue; ditto plenty of other words like "seafoam." That's kind of my point -- modulo another poster's comment about this being a test of bad monitor calibration, it's really more about language than about color.
I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?
Our green cones are the most sensitive and their range significantly overlaps with red cones, so it's only natural that going from green towards red you'll be able to make clearer distinctions between colors than the other way.
Also, yellow-blue and red-green are opponents that can't be mixed because of how our retinas preprocess the signals from cones. Therefore, you obviously end up with blue-green (cyan), red-yellow (orange), yellow-green (lime) and blue-red (magenta, which actually doesn't exist on the light spectrum) families of related colors.
Although the question "is the color distinct and basic or just a shade?" is very subjective. Is pink distinct or a shade of red/purple? Is purple distinct or a shade of red/blue? Is green distinct or a shade of blue? (it's well-known that in Japanese green separated from blue only relatively recently, with very bluish traffic lights and other quirks included)
I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.
I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.
Wrong way to do it. We know from psychometrics that forced binaries like this just create junk (people disagree with the question, so just choose a forced answer based on some heuristic for each such question like "closest to my mouse / finger" or "most socially desirable" or "same as last time"). So you aren't measuring what you think when you force choice like this.
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.
Is it really junk though? There are several comments in this thread like “people tell me I call stuff blue that they think is green and this quiz confirms that.”
Forced binary choices on single-item, self-report questions produce scientific junk, absolutely. This kind of design / approach encourages not only magnitude errors, but also sign errors (you can't even trust the direction of the observed effect).
IMO, growing up, unless you lived under a rock, it seems obvious to me that you will have experienced different people pointing at the same colour and uttering very different colour labels (pink vs. red, blue vs. green, black vs. deep blue/purple, etc) from the labels you might have applied yourself. Differing/shared colour perception isn't exactly a rare kind of topic (almost is like the canonical stoner topic, also common online), so I'd be a bit surprised if this demo is actually introducing anyone to this concept already. Any excitement is surely from other implications people think the demo has.
But unfortunately there are no interesting implications from what this site shows. Yes, it demonstrates the boring fact that: "it isn't clear how different people assign different color labels to the same physical stimuli" (and yes, this is FALSELY assuming that everyone's monitors/screens are the same too), but if you didn't already know this... I'm not sure exactly what social context you could have possibly grown up in.
It's a linguistics thing, it's about word usage more than about colour. You ask someone to get a book off the shelf, and you say "get the blue book" and the person is confused because they see a green book.
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
In linguistics this sort of thinking comes from 'basic color term' theory, which lays out heuristics for deciding if a word for a color in a given language is 'basic'. 2 things going against these blue-green terms are:
* 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).
> Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
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?
Sapir-Worf and its ilk (if we don't have the language/concept, we can't perceive the difference/thing) are widely disproven and debunked, and don't even pass the smell test (learning new concepts and perceiving new things would be impossible). That kind of thinking is so tedious and decades out of date with modern cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, etc.
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.
Some languages uses the terms "turquoise green" and "turquoise blue", but still have "turquoise" as a standalone. It would be interesting to have that tested, e.g. when do you use each term, when do you go from "turquoise blue" to "this is just turquoise"?
But turquoise can be a blue, just because we have a specific word, doesn't mean more general words are invalieated or made as specific.
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.
Agree, this seemed silly. It seems to be more a question of "would you say turquise is blue or green?" Rather than a question of our blues match. Better imo would be to ask something like paired colours and pick the "more blue" one. Cool idea for a website, but imo poorly formulated.
Younger locals who have mostly or only known the LED think it's a bit odd, but just call them blue because that's the common convention and many youths may think that the former lights might have actually been blue.
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.
I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.
(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.)
My boundary was hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population, for me turquoise is green and then it shows an overall chart which I have to agree with so no, I don't agree with your assessment. I often get into blue/green arguments with my children and that's when I started to suspect that it was personal opinion.
"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.
Your example would only be valid if "blue" and "green" had objective answers for when something is Blue and something is Green and have clear demarcated boundaries. You're switching to a literal boundary example where there are actual lines to be crossed. Colors are a fuzzy continuum; national boundaries, not including fought-over areas like the Sea of Japan, are easy to be in or not.
You are confusing geographical position with countries.
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.
I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.
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.
But what about the definition of aqua outside of any digital color space?
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
This test finds the midpoints of people's spectrum. They're not asking is "is this completely blue or completely green" but rather "is this more blue or green"
This is the wrong way to do it, psychometrically, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929056. You need to provide people gradations, or you get junk responses / abandonment, and your instrument doesn't measure what you think.
It's ok that there are things you don't understand in the world. It's just as valid for them to exist, as it is you are upset about it.
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.
What a fun site. Obviously results will depend on the monitor. At the last screen picture which show "where is my blue" and the gradient from green to blue I moved it from one monitor to other - what a difference! Time to dig into monitors setting to get more consistency (or for new monitors - do the color change with time? - one is more lit in the morning by sun but other do not get direct sunlight almost at all- both are the same type). What is funny it did not bother me at all - I do not work with any graphics and color. But probably now it will :).
Tried this on 2 monitors, made a difference of 77%-85%
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.
I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.
The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.
I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.
You certainly stumbled onto it much sooner in life than I did. It wasn't until I had children in my late 30s that this dawned on me - and has perplexed me ever since. Funny indeed.
Yup, always wondered this as well! The word for each internal subjective experience is called qualia.
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)
We know for a fact that bees or dogs perceive color very differently. But in between humans, the perception of physical sensations can still be resolved when we consider near-identical genetics.
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 :)
You'd be inclined to, but no, of the little we do understand about human perception, we do understand enough by now to say that different people can genuinely experience and perceive the world differently, sometimes wildly so.
Look into aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), anendophasia (lack of inner voice).
I have thought about this many times. The same could be asked about other senses as well like taste, do we both interpret the taste of a banana the same?
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.
There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.
Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.
In terms of pass me the blue note, yep. I consider the 2000 and 50000 in your photo as blue.
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).
In Polish language we commonly call turquoise "lightblue", so instinctively we'll have the boundary not at the middle of the turquoise, but between the turquiose and green, (i got hue 165, 95% of the population). We also call it "sea-color", but sea is also more culturally associated with blue than green.
I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-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.
This "test" makes no sense. Cyan, and especially turquoise are neither blue nor green, they are a mix (similar to orange between red / yellow).
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).
72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".
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.
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.
I always wanted to have a color calibrator and a few years back i bought one.
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.
A lot of the color calibration obsession was from back when panels shipped with truly awful factory calibration. A quick perusal of rtings suggests that most manufacturers try and pre-calibrate their panels these days
Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.
My numbers kept varying wildly from 174 to 189, in the same patterns across multiple devices (initial number different from stable next-five results), so I tried a few things.
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.
Interesting.
Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
Though everyone calls a solid blue color as blue, the actual visual perception or experience of that color could be entirely different. They just grew up calling that experience of their own, as blue color.
As others have pointed out, the 2nd color is not something I would call either blue or green. Except for the first, it never showed anything I would call blue. So really I have told it the border where I still call something green. So is my green your green?
This is flawed. Turquoise is not blue or green. Also different displays will show different colors. And a lot of displays aren’t great at producing the hues in the green color space. Idk the test seems arbitrary, but I’m not color expert
I'm not sure what's going on, but in Chrome my median point is heavily on the blue side but in Safari it's on the Green side. Also, at least in Safari, reset leads to a series of perceptually unchanging turquois screens -- it seems a bug. Refreshing fixes it for the next run.
One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.
That’s assuming that there is something like a “true” internal color that external colors are mapped onto. I think it’s more likely that for the brain, “red” is just “that hue signal range that red things have”. Which is roughly the same for everyone (modulo color blindness), in the sense that if one person sees two objects as red, another person will also see them as the same color, and will perceive the same brightness and hue relation relative to other objects with adjacent brightness and/or hue.
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”.
My suggestion is always to look at what colors people think "go together". A Westerner looking at a Chinese temple will say "ugh, saturated red, light blue, and gold, all together?" My own self looking at a shirt my Eastern European wife loves: "dark blue, gray, and orange, bleah". It suggests that depending on your culture, you may have adopted a different visual response, where blood color is harmonious with sky color, or something like that.
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.
It is mentioned on the about page but I still feel like pointing out that your response to this test has as much to do with your perception of colors as how green or blue your screen is and what kind of ambient lighting there is. Especially considering how subtle the differences are in the final rounds of the test.
Still an interesting experiment, but I would be cautious about drawing conclusions about anything from it.
Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?
No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
"Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population.
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.
Reminds me of the discussions with my wife. She is from Japan and, over there, you cross a traffic light when it's "blue". IIRC, the word was chosen before international agreements, and the colour has shifted towards green since, but it's still more blueish than in other countries. And they still call it "blue".
This is like one of those eye tests where they switch between lenses narrowing in on the prescription. The question is really what shades of turquoise is more blue than green.
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.
I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:
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?
The boundary regions at 3:00, 7:00, and 11:00 are composite colors that have ~2x the brightness compared to the primary colors of red, green, and blue. For someone without a color vision deficiency, they appear brighter than surrounding colors, but the saturation really only varies with distance from the center. For example, to me, the point at 3:00 on the edge of the circle is the peak of a "ridge" in brightness, but appears as a very saturated teal.
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!
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.
I’m not color blind and see a white barrier between 3 sections(it looks like a 3 piece pie) with lines at the green/blue red/blue and green/yellow boundaries.
My family has a long genetic history of color blindness so I’ve been tested many times. None of those diagnostics has produced a result of color blindness but perhaps there is some form that’s not been categorized yet.
I came back as with a measure of 174 and a label of "true neutral".
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.
I also got 174. I turned the brightness up on my phone (to about 65-70%) before starting, but that was it. No resetting my eyes between colors. Considering I’m red/green colorblind, and certain hues of green I see as gray, I’m pretty shocked by the result. I suspect having a binary choice helped a lot, as once it was no longer something I could consider blue, I’d call it green.
Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.
apart from not giving the "neither" option of turquoise, you cannot just line up asking without neutralising perception in between eg. with a non blue/green and then white before the next test. Color perception is >relative< not just across individuals, not sure how someone interested enough in blue perception does not understand this.
This is cretinous. There's a well defined colour in between blue and green which is turquoise / cyan. It even says at the end "You see turquoise as x". No I don't, I see it as turquoise. It's like asking is the red or is this yellow without acknowledging the existence of orange. Either rage bait or pure idiocy.
Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see 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
I remember a pic of a shirt, which a former colleague of mine was showing on his monitor ten years ago, and the office splitted half in recognizing the colours, can't remember if they were gold vs black; but we went crazy because nobody could believe that the other half was seeing a colour different from the one they were seeing!
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.
Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.
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.
It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.
Noticing on my monitor that it's more blue if I tiptoe and look down, and it's obviously green when looking at below.
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.
Thanks to the TMS9918, I know cyan when I see it! Years of seeing cyan on a composite monitor where hue is tricky to adjust. My tolerance for the amount of green allowed in cyan is higher. And if it's cyan, it's blue. I see I classified quite a few greenish as cyan therefore blue.
I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.
I wouldn't call most of those colors green or blue. Most of them looked identical to me as well. I ended up picking arbitrarily for all but the two I thought were distinctly one or the other.
Asinine and meaningless. Forces a classification on something that obviously anyone with fully-functioning colour vision will classify as "aquamarine" or "turquoise" or etc.
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.
I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called either green or blue.
I don't find this compelling as it seems to me it's well acknowledged there are colors that are BOTH. As in there are colors widely considered to be blue-green. Blue and Green.
This is awesome! I have a slight case of tritanopia in one eye and it was neat to see the difference. My boundary is bluer by 59% in one eye and 87% in the other. It tracks with what I would have expected.
While neat, I don't get consistent scores if I retry it a few times. If it leads with a series of greens first, my score is more green oriented, and vice versa.
Interesting, I got a completely different result on green/blue on this one, way more green whereas I got average on the individual test. Going between very different colors makes it hard to reset - they might consider breaks between spectra.
I was always fascinated by this kind of question as a kid. Like I would imagine that everyone had all the colors mixed up and we were each seeing something different.
This only checks a single brightness level per hue. I bet that two people who agree for those levels might very well disagree at other levels, and vice versa.
This is stupid without color calibration, or even contrast/brightness levels on your monitor, which can turn these turquoise shades into other colors entirely.
The "exact 50%", or the boundary between green and blue, is nominally hue 180, which is cyan. A search for the RGB, CMYK and HSL for turquoise yielded a few hue values from 171 to 174 (depending who you trust, and allowing for a bit of drift due to colorspace conversions). In any case, 171, 172, 173, and 174 are all on the green side of cyan.
The xkcd color survey[1] was 16 years ago now. With the data available, there were various follow-ups. Many, including xkcd's own "take it for fun here" link there in [1], are now 404. But the strata[2] and word cloud[3] are still up, and relevant here.
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.
Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?
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.
people are getting more stupid
debate without evidence and logic is rampant
the title is the clasic example of word salad, pretending to be valid conjecture , but only exists to cause distraction through
"subjectification"
or foucault off, already
When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.
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.
This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?
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.
it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.
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
As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.
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.
People are freaking out about this test like it’s some judgement of their character or something. I just picked “green” or “blue” without thinking.
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.
> 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.
Even if anyone actually calibrated their screens, many cheap monitor panels are so shitty the calibration can’t help. I bought two 4K LG monitors at the same time and based on serial numbers, they’re likely from the same batch but LG likes to mix panels on their cheaper products. They have wildly different color spaces to the point where one swallows several points of grayscale*, which means I have to use the right monitor when viewing sites otherwise I lose the subtle gray-on-white that designers love so much.
* black crush I think its called
I'd love to see a photograph of a 32 bit greyscale gradient on both. I wonder if some monitors with similar issues would not be able to represent the photograph properly.
People are not freaking out just pointing out stupidity of such test with 2 options only, no need for hyperbole.
Also f.lux and other software that changes color temperatures depending on time of day :)
By what method would you suggest calibrating one's monitor? I use Debian Linux if that's a factor.
You can do it on Linux but you need to buy a device you attach to your monitor. I have a Spyder X Pro but there are others.
It’s like $200 and it’s not worth it unless you do color sensitive work (photo editing, printing or video editing) and you have an expensive monitor or expensive laptop with good color support. Many monitors will fail so badly the calibration won’t be able to fix it.
But if you’ve ever had a lot of trouble trying to get colors to match when printing or between devices, it could be a godsend, although it’s only one of the many reasons colors might not match.
Thank you.
I wonder if photo stores might have the device, and if they would loan it. I'm surprised there is no method of calibration against common objects of known colour, such as Euro bills.
If you use the proper profile for your monitor and set the monitor to a profile that's relatively accurate it should be decent
While "orange" did not exist as a single word in most languages, already in Old English or even in Latin or Ancient Greek one could find mentions about things that were "red-yellow".
Moreover, in ancient languages there were very few words that designed just a color, with no other meaning for the word, but it was very frequent to use words derived from the names of various things, which meant "of the color of the X thing".
For instance it was frequent to say that some things were "of the color of fire". Most likely this was intended to say that they were orange. For red objects one would have said "of the color of blood", while for yellow objects one would have said "of the color of sulfur" or "of the color of gold". "Of the color of saffron" is also likely to have meant "orange", though saffron may have many hues, from reddish to yellowish, depending on how it is prepared.
> Moreover, in ancient languages there were very few words that designed just a color, with no other meaning for the word, but it was very frequent to use words derived from the names of various things, which meant "of the color of the X thing".
Isn't this how things are still today? For example "orange".
This test is really using how English organizes color. In English, blue and green are basic color terms ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)). You're right that we would have trouble with an orange screen if we were asked to call it red or yellow, but that's because orange is also a basic color term in English.
Other languages draw those boundaries in different places. For example, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are separate basic color terms (goluboy vs. siniy), so asking a Russian speaker to collapse those into a single category would feel just as wrong as collapsing orange into red or yellow does to us.
Cyan isn't a basic color term in English. So yes, the test is basically asking: if you had to assign this color to one of the basic English categories, what would it be?
The frustration you're describing is kind of the point. With something like orange, English gives us a clear category, so "rounding" feels wrong. With cyan, it doesn't, so people end up splitting it differently.
The person you were responding to said that cyan feels like a completely different color to them, neither green nor blue. I had the same reaction when it gave me a color that I immediately identified as teal, and I learned my colors as a monolingual english speaker in Ohio. Therefore the supposition that all English speakers see only blue or green is an oversimplification.
Thanks, this seemed obvious to me too. But I would add, this could apply to orange too - there are a lot of orange tones between yellow and red, and if you likewise wanted to determine your subjective boundary, which this is only about, you would be able to say "rather red for me" or "rather yellow for me", regardless of the intermediate color. Since the space of colors can be described as convex, so to speak, you can between every two arbitrary colors determine your subjective decision boundary, regardless of any color in between. The premise is just accepting to ignore those colors.
And this changes over time, because for me cyan IS a basic colour term and I'm a native English speaker.
The current use of "cyan" for blue-green is a modern confusion caused by people who have used Greek words without bothering to check their true meaning.
In Ancient Greek, "cyan" was blue, not blue-green. More precisely, it was the color of the pigment "ultramarine blue", which has remained widely used until today. The name of this pigment was already used by the Hittites, long before the Greeks.
An example of a Latin author who distinguished consistently green, blue-green and blue in many places is Pliny the Elder.
Blue was referred to as the color of the sky or the color of the blue pigments used in painting, like ultramarine blue.
Green was referred to as "green like grass", "green like tree leaves" or "green like emeralds".
Blue-green was referred to as "green like the littoral sea", "green like turquoise" or "green like beryls".
This is especially obvious in the discussion about emeralds and beryls, which are identical but for their color, the former being green and the latter blue-green.
Similarly, in Latin "red" was used for both red and purple, but the two colors were distinguished as "red like crimson dye" (beetle-based dye) and "red like purple dye" (snail-based dye).
Someone has downvoted this, despite the fact that what I have written is not an opinion, but just facts.
Because I have seen on HN extremely frequently downvotes that just show that the downvoters are ignorant about what they downvote. I stopped a long time ago to downvote comments.
Now I either upvote when I agree and otherwise I write a comment explaining why I disagree.
It would have been better if others had followed such a policy.
Perhaps the downvoter had something to say about "cyan", but this is indeed only one example of a long list of Ancient Greek words that have been borrowed into English during the 19th and 20th century, but which are used with incorrect meanings. Most likely this is due to the fact that those who have introduced these words did not study the Ancient Greek language and they also did not consult anyone knowledgeable or any good dictionaries. Another example of this kind is "macro" used as an opposite for "micro", i.e. as "big", while the true opposite of "micro" is "mega" = "big", while "macro" means "long", the opposite of "short" ("brachy" in Ancient Greek).
It is not an incorrect meaning, it is that meaning of the word in English is different. What it meant in ancient Greek or in 1805 is not relevant to what it means today.
Words meanings shift over time in all languages. And when languages take sounds from other languages, they also regularly shift their meanings.
I found this an interesting "actually...", not sure why you're being downvoted.
Ofc the modern usage is not necessarily a "confusion" because of an older meaning, maybe that's bothering people, but I read it as tongue-in-cheek.
I prefer "turquoise" anyway, which is more common in German for blue-greenish colors.
There is no doubt that confusions are the origin of these English words.
It is extremely unlikely that any of those who introduced these words in English chose intentionally to use them for other things than for what they had been used for millennia.
For a modern user, it is no longer a confusion to use such words in their currently widespread sense. When speaking to others, I also use such words with their current meaning, in order to be understood.
Nevertheless, it is good to know their original meanings, especially when reading older texts, which may use those meanings. I have seen a lot of ridiculous claims about texts written in the Antiquity, or even about some texts written a couple of centuries ago, where those who had read those texts had been mislead by believing that the words had the same meaning as in modern English.
Especially about the colors known by ancient people, e.g about the Ancient Greeks, there have been many fantastic theories, e.g. that the Ancient Greeks did not know blue or brown, when already in the Iliad of Homer there are a lot of instances of words meaning "blue" (= "the color of the ultramarine blue pigment") or "brown" (= "the color of burnt wood").
Fair!
Thanks for elaborating. So not tongue-in-cheek at all.
>As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.
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.
> most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green
For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
>For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all!
That's sorta not true, it's just a quirk of language development. If they only have one word that covers both, they use additional words to describe the actual shade they're talking about.
Of these, the only language that I know a bit about, in Chinese 青 (blue/green) is the older word and nowadays used less than the more modern 蓝 (blue) and 绿 (green), but actually 青 is still used a lot in specific phrases, and I prefer to think of it as the "colour of things in nature" - so a blue sky would be 青, a blue/green sea would be 青 and a field of lush grass would also be 青. That aspect also comes through in how it's used metaphorically, in the senses of youth or vitality.
This is the same character that's used for Japanese traffic lights when foreigners find it funny that they call obviously green lights "blue".
The latter tests were all a bit pointless because they were just turquoise, and all looked much the same - a mix of blue and green, so I was pretty much answering based on whether it was bluer or greener than the previous image.
The results said "Your boundary is at hue 179, bluer than 82% of the population. For you, turquoise is green." and definitely if I was judging the boundary on a gradient, I'd have placed the line a bit further to the right.
Yes, very annoying, we know from extensive work in psychometrics that single-item, binary / forced-choice items produce junk responses that are heavily contaminated with response styles (answer in most socially-desirable way, select closest response to mouse/finger, select same response as last time, select random response, etc). Just give people an out ("Diagree with the question / premises", "Prefer not to answer", "Unsure / Can't decide", etc) and make sure you have e.g. a 5-7 point Likert-type scale for multiple items, or up to an 11-point scale for single items.
This kind of site / demo does none of the above, and so can't even be trusted for directional effects (the direction of response may simple be due to the type of people responding, etc).
I was having a discussion closely related to this recently because of my background in philosophy of language. Languages are functional, but not rigid. The rules and referents of "blue" become kind of pointless around the edges, and narrow words like cyan or turquoise -- even words borrowed from other languages -- are more functional. This is exaggerated further when the functionality becomes very important, which is where technical jargon starts to come into play. Languages should useful to the speaker; they do not define the constraints of the speaker. "Blue" is useful for the average English speaker, but completely useless for a graphic designer.
Philosophically speaking, does each of us experience "520 nm green" the same way?
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?
My left and right eyes are shifted +cyan and +magenta respectively, so, no, definitely not — but hooray for the resulting semi-tetrachromacy :D
For different brains, the answer has to be no because the images you see are a "neural net" construction and if that neural net differs then the "image" you see is different
this is actually a surprisingly rich area of debate in philosophy of mind. see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/
Consciousness and qualia are a mystery.
I would assume we don’t, simply because nerves are reproduced biologically, but I’m not a neuroscientist.
>the same g-protein coupled b
If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?
define "experience the same way"
There's a philosophical school of thought (which I share) that there's no coherent definition.
My daughter was watching Blue's Clues. They were doing color combinations (red + blue = purple, yellow + blue = green, etc). They then also did a further step, blue + green = cyan, and did green + yellow = chartreuse. Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.
> Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.
You need to get into either fishing (chartreuse lures are common) or cocktails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) .
The funny part about color spaces being that you can't make (pure) cyan out of green and blue, which is exactly why CMYK is used over RYB in inks.
(I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)
For subtractive colors (dyes) you're right. For additive (light), green and blue make cyan (Hex: #00FFFF)
I only know chartreuse from fishing lures.
Same.
Dad: Hey, what rig did we catch that king on?
Me: Live pogey with a chartreuse minnow.
I only know chartreuse from the liquor.
I thought it was green though.
There is yellow Chartreuse as well. I seem to recall preferring the yellow, though it's been over a decade, so I can't remember how either one tastes.
> When we want violet, we know just what to do. Just mix our good friends purple and blue.
I still refuse to believe that purple and violet are different colors.
I agreed with you, and then went to the Wikipedia pages for both. I might have changed my mind now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_(color)
I think using violet as a name for the entire color-range around (~128, 0, 255) is also common. So in a sense purple is an element of the violet color-range. But as points they are distinct. I think purple is more specific - as a color-range it'd cover less area.
Purple has a lot more red. (157, 0, 255) vs. (128, 0, 255). Good to have learned something today...
Logically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% blue.
Cyan isn't between green and blue, at least not completely. If you take green and blue, you won't be able to represent a good chunk of cyan hues. It feels greenish and blueish, but is neither, and is broader than any combination of the two, which is partly why some bright cyan objects (like the bird eggs on Wikipedia) look kind of unnaturally intense. Those eggs are a bright, slightly blue-leaning cyan.
BTW, cyan is very poorly represented by sRGB color space. I was delighted to see the real vibrant cyan of the Mediterranean sea.
You might like this then. [0]
[0] https://dynomight.net/colors/#2
That went from a fun, interesting experience, to wondering if this is how SCP 3125 was going to get me, as the entire screen seemed to become a wild glowing green long after the animation likely ended.
వ
It's always great to experience completely new qualia.
and device dependent. this is a very tricky thing to get rendered consistently
Yes, for me cyan is firmly a shade of blue, and turquoise is a blue color that's somewhat greenish.
funny thing is that I would have said cyan was blue going into this, but the outcome had me classifying the boundary at "more blue than 93% of the population" -- meaning that I classed cyan as green when asked, without even remotely questioning it.
Same for me, I classify it as blue.
The whole point is to measure where you draw the line between blue and green, which is going to be in turquoise territory.
When you finish the test it even tells you if you consider turquoise blue or green.
Except you can reject the very (stupid) question / framing, in which case, the response is to either close the tab, or respond in a particular response style, neither of which makes the data more informative. This kind of clumsy stuff is just dumb with what we know now, edutainment distraction for the HN crowd.
There was a time when there were no separate names for blue and green in the Japanese language. Some languages right now have concepts of fundamental colors like navy blue and light blue, where English rolls it into a single "blue". Naming colors is highly cultural and changes over time. The idea that colors have boundaries is fascinating from both psychological as well as linguistic perspectives.
The framing seems stupid if you take the naive perspective that your language's way of dividing colors is the only valid one. Exercises like this and discussions that follow help expand perspectives.
I have no idea when the words entered the languages, but I find it quite interesting that the color Orange in Thai is literally the color of the fruit (สีส้ม) whereas in Hungarian it is the same fruit as a shade of yellow (narancssárga).
That's very funny to have my exact reaction present in the first comment, I was thinking "that's turquoise" but I do also feel like turquoise is green, like you'd call the Copenhagen copper domes green, and the word verdigris comes from green
Pink isn't real
There are no "cyan-receptors" on your retina so it's not a cultural thing, it's a bio-physics one. Plus as many mentioned the calibration of you display has propably a way higher impact on this than anything else.
So don't be upset, it's just for fun :)
I mean, that's the whole point of this exercise. In reality there is no hard line between green and blue, and if you make someone pick, their line is going to be entirely subjective, and different than others.
That's like saying there's no hard line between e.g. white and gray, or even white and black if we take it to an extreme. And that is accurate, if you slowly shift between the two then people will claim a transition at slightly different points, but it's entirely meaningless because it's (getting back to the blue/green example) not like anybody is going to insist 'no that's blue!' or 'no that's green!' It's obvious that it's intentionally ambiguous and so any pick at such a point is going to be largely arbitrary with little attachment held by anybody.
[1] - https://colordesigner.io/color-mixer
Actually people will definitely insist on "no that's blue" or "no that's green." My husband and I have frequent disagreements about a specific shade of blue/green. I think it's blue. He thinks it's green.
It does seem like more of a test of if you consider turquoise to be "a green" or "a blue"
Came here to say the same thing.
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.
Not only that but once you pick green or blue it's going to skew your results in that direction. I got a higher level of blue as my result but it's only because that's what I picked since I had to pick one of them.
the question is if you think this shade of cyan is more green than blue
I’m aware of cyan, of course, but it never occurred to me while doing this quiz, because the point was clearly to choose between blue and green. Of course there’s cyan, turquoise, teal, sky blue, etc., but the point is to make the potentially difficult choice between only blue and 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.
It's a false dichrotamy.
> As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
Just as all other modern schooling, the teaching of colors is done deliberately order to dumb down children and starve them from their natural ability to learn.
A child will learn at least dozens, if not hundreds of colors, if they are allowed to and taught. This has a real impact, because unless you learn this, it can be very difficult as an adult to be able to actually see the difference between colors.
But instead idiots make toys with only simple prime colors, and even playgrounds. Even though children themselves prefer more diverse and interesting color schemes.
Although after a few dozen color names, I think children are more benefitted by learning more about color theory such as physical paint mixing, digital mixing like RGB and HSL, and physical light effects on colours.
let's be honest, orange is really a burnt yellow
Orange is bright brown!
By the way, my comment is entirely in jest.
I would struggle to have to choose between only the words "red" and "yellow" to describe orange colours. Except for the orange fruit. I'm happy calling those yellow.
But the YCombinator logo? Yellowish red?
This was exactly my issue. There was no perception issue I could clearly identify the intermediate color as neither truly blue or green.
it's either blue, or it's green. pick a side, coward
Ambiguity scaring the shit out of engineers is giving me life on this blah of a Monday.
It's almost like color is a spectrum of light and we just arbitrarily slice it and decide "this has a name" because we are finite being who demand order from things that are not ordered and then demand further order from that order and get REALLY mad.
But color isn't a spectrum of light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/
Taught by whom? I hear parents are wonderful teachers.
Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.
The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!
Many languages considered green and blue so closely related that they grouped them together under a single term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
grue
It's better than bleen I suppose.
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?
This one in particular is going to be difficult to get good results. Depending on your era you may have been eaten by a grue at some point.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
Not a native speaker, bleen for me got auto corrected by my brain to green. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but I'd prefer grue because my brain will immediately understand we're talking about the umbrella term. If grue is said out of context, I'd imagine Gru from despicable me, when written I'd imagine gruel, but, again, because I'm not a native speaker, instead of yucky food I'd instead think about that episode of Masha and the Bear where they end up with a houseful of the porridge.
"grue" has a specific meaning in philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction
In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
I have had similar conversations with my wife a few times, but I'm the one with working color vision.
That’s amusing because I am the converse: my boundary is bluer than 98% of the population. To a first approximation, blue is a very specific thing and all the other colors appear strongly non-blue to me. I do wonder where this preference came from, but it explains all the puzzling interactions between my wife and I over the years.
My boundary is also greener than 95% of the population. I think it's because I mentally separate cyan from green and blue, but still see cyan as a shade of blue. If you asked me what color it was without forcing green or blue, I'd have answered cyan on most of them.
...I get different numbers depending on which eye I use, but both are fairly center. I didn't expect blue-green to be affected though! My left eye can't see certain shades of red as well as my right eye. Bright sunlight makes it more noticeable, but my own skin looks weirdly (sickly) yellowish with one eye and normal with the other.
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. ;)
...I never found another person with the same experience. Here we are. For me though, it's not that sunlight makes it more noticeable, it's that I will see the same shades until I've had too much sunlight—eventually my left eye gets tired, I guess, and sees a lot less red than my right eye. After sleeping it resets and I see the same shade in both eyes. Maybe i should talk to a researcher about this..
I had the same discussion with the color of a river in Albania with my wife. The test says my boundary is a bluer than 85% of the pop - sounds about right!
I am bluer than 78%. Colors. How do they work.
It’s 01:30 in the night you cannot just drop lyrics like that, I’ll have the song stuck in my head for hours.. :(
For this, you just lost The Game.
The only effective ear bleach for that is, say, German Weimar Republic era cabaret Orchester; eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bPh9CitHJs
You bastard.
Don't worry.
https://xkcd.com/391/
The game mentioned
Thanks for the earworm.
I'm bluer than 98% apparently. For me, turquoise is green. I didn't realize that's not normal.
If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.
blue than 90%, same verdict with turqouise, though what I call turquoise is bluer than what is shown
90% here, and it makes sense. I'm very picky about saying something is blue!
You've got the blues.
Same situation happened to me, and I have same test result as you.
I have this with a coat, but it's blue vs gray. Would be interesting to generalize this tool not just for other colours, but for other colour properties like saturation not just hue.
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
100%. It's like being asked is this black or white and being shown 50% grey.
That’s the point of this. To find out where in that spectrum your vision lands, not to get a perfect score.
OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
Huh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
yeah I've always thought of cyan as just "blue, but really bright", which does make sense - you're going from 0, 0, 100 (blue) to 0, 100, 100 (cyan) so it's twice as far from pure black. I also see pure cyan as being much more blue than green.
There's no way for me to answer truthfully whether teal is blue or green. It is neither. Anything I give gives a false answer. The data is invalid.
How would you feel about a test for "teal or blue" or "teal or green?" You still need to make binary choices, just along different boundaries. Would it make any difference?
Incorrect, it either lies on the blue side or the green side, you must choose. Neither is not an option.
If you gave me the exact same color code 20 times I might give you green 10 times and blue the other 10 because I genuinely can't tell the difference. So it's not a binary like you're claiming.
If you did that, your score would be 50%, that’s how this works.
Sometimes the answer can be “I reject the premise.”
I’m sure you’ve had conversations where that’s the answer you want to give.
I chose to close the tab.
But reproducibility should be the point. As a result of the structure it approaches an asymptote from one side or the other. I took it once and approached from green and my greenness was 77%, a second time it approached from blue and my blueness was 68%.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
>correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. I understand that there's a continuum in reality, but psychologically, I still tend to perceive each shade as discretely either blue or green, especially when the shade is presented in isolation. Words like "teal", "cyan", etc. aren't really part of my normal vocabulary and to the extent that they are, I would think of them as subsets of blue or green, not disjoint sets.
I think the test can be fairly criticised on the basis that it is assuming everyone's psychological colour space has a discrete boundary between blue and green, which clearly isn't the case for some people (like you), but it is for others (like me).
It's so remarkable how many people here refuse to understand your point. It's like, there is no right or wrong, no perfect score, just pure subjectiveness, and they can't handle it. If I wasn't convinced this site is entirely bots before, I might be now....
It is enlightening to see who has been fixed on math proofs as testing and who has been exposed to observational testing. Seems many people have been brain washed into the former, forgetting the latter exists.
But that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception or vision, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).
I think the premise could be stated more clearly. It is a boolean choice. What do you think it is closer to.
Once I figured it, I tried it 2 more times ... and got different results :) but the new results were consistent.
Agreed, there is no clear premise. Of course that different people looking at the same object will use different colour words is a triviality that anyone over, say, 10 years old knows. If that's the premise of the site, it is boring. People are getting excited because they think this implies something about differences in vision or perception... but it doesn't, that requires much more cleverness to test.
Or suspension of expectations…
It’s not really the same, because black and white strongly connote being at the far ends of their continuum (lightness), and are thus opposites, whereas blue and green are more vaguely specified as nearby spots on their continuum (hue).
Yeah, but is the gray to you more look more black or more white? That's the point.
It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
That is the point of the exercise though. Is 50% really where you draw the line?
But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
Ok, but presumably you can make a test that goes from 50% gray to 100% black and you have to say "this is black" or "this is gray"
No scientific line. But where does your mind put it if asked without being told which it is? This test is about where you perceive that line to be.
but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
Are there really people whose language treats “cyan” and “turquoise” as distinct colors which are not in the “blue-green” family?
I don't know if there are people who treat turquoise and aqua as distinct, but I certainly treat them as distinct from blue (azure, cobalt) and green. Several of the colors around the mid range in the linked page are not colors I would use the words "blue" or "green" for. That doesn't mean that I have strict rules here; I don't actually know if I would call what you call "cyan" turquoise or blue; ditto plenty of other words like "seafoam." That's kind of my point -- modulo another poster's comment about this being a test of bad monitor calibration, it's really more about language than about color.
I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?
Our green cones are the most sensitive and their range significantly overlaps with red cones, so it's only natural that going from green towards red you'll be able to make clearer distinctions between colors than the other way.
Also, yellow-blue and red-green are opponents that can't be mixed because of how our retinas preprocess the signals from cones. Therefore, you obviously end up with blue-green (cyan), red-yellow (orange), yellow-green (lime) and blue-red (magenta, which actually doesn't exist on the light spectrum) families of related colors.
Many Slavic languages do that, as well as Albanian for some reason?
Russian speakers broadly consider sky blue / turquoise / cyan a distinct color right between green and blue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Although the question "is the color distinct and basic or just a shade?" is very subjective. Is pink distinct or a shade of red/purple? Is purple distinct or a shade of red/blue? Is green distinct or a shade of blue? (it's well-known that in Japanese green separated from blue only relatively recently, with very bluish traffic lights and other quirks included)
I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.
I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.
Same here, it's often neither blue nor green, so this experiment is pointless.
Thats the exact point of this experiment to define the inbetween and move it to either green or blue.
:/
Wrong way to do it. We know from psychometrics that forced binaries like this just create junk (people disagree with the question, so just choose a forced answer based on some heuristic for each such question like "closest to my mouse / finger" or "most socially desirable" or "same as last time"). So you aren't measuring what you think when you force choice like this.
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.
Is it really junk though? There are several comments in this thread like “people tell me I call stuff blue that they think is green and this quiz confirms that.”
Forced binary choices on single-item, self-report questions produce scientific junk, absolutely. This kind of design / approach encourages not only magnitude errors, but also sign errors (you can't even trust the direction of the observed effect).
IMO, growing up, unless you lived under a rock, it seems obvious to me that you will have experienced different people pointing at the same colour and uttering very different colour labels (pink vs. red, blue vs. green, black vs. deep blue/purple, etc) from the labels you might have applied yourself. Differing/shared colour perception isn't exactly a rare kind of topic (almost is like the canonical stoner topic, also common online), so I'd be a bit surprised if this demo is actually introducing anyone to this concept already. Any excitement is surely from other implications people think the demo has.
But unfortunately there are no interesting implications from what this site shows. Yes, it demonstrates the boring fact that: "it isn't clear how different people assign different color labels to the same physical stimuli" (and yes, this is FALSELY assuming that everyone's monitors/screens are the same too), but if you didn't already know this... I'm not sure exactly what social context you could have possibly grown up in.
That makes about as much sense as trying to compete for who can provide the most wrong answer for "2+2="
It's a linguistics thing, it's about word usage more than about colour. You ask someone to get a book off the shelf, and you say "get the blue book" and the person is confused because they see a green book.
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
I think the "numeric" equivalent to this would be "is this a few/many?"
And you would get some number arguing how "several" is a distinct category in the same way this post has people talking about cyan.
I interpreted the buttons to mean "this is bluer than it is green" and "this is greener than it is blue".
In linguistics this sort of thinking comes from 'basic color term' theory, which lays out heuristics for deciding if a word for a color in a given language is 'basic'. 2 things going against these blue-green terms are:
* 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).
"for you, turquoise is blue." Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
> Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
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:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
Sapir-Worf and its ilk (if we don't have the language/concept, we can't perceive the difference/thing) are widely disproven and debunked, and don't even pass the smell test (learning new concepts and perceiving new things would be impossible). That kind of thinking is so tedious and decades out of date with modern cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, etc.
Not everything you listed is the same.
> 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.
>> Where does "grey" end and "black" begin? >When the color is 100% black.
But what does this mean? Only vantablack is black, everything else is grey?
Some languages uses the terms "turquoise green" and "turquoise blue", but still have "turquoise" as a standalone. It would be interesting to have that tested, e.g. when do you use each term, when do you go from "turquoise blue" to "this is just turquoise"?
Haha I got "for you, turquoise is green" and I was like... Yeah, is it not?
This is the first time I realized that turquoise is the gray area.
But turquoise can be a blue, just because we have a specific word, doesn't mean more general words are invalieated or made as specific.
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.
For many people this is like saying 'for you red is blue'.
Agree, this seemed silly. It seems to be more a question of "would you say turquise is blue or green?" Rather than a question of our blues match. Better imo would be to ask something like paired colours and pick the "more blue" one. Cool idea for a website, but imo poorly formulated.
Younger locals who have mostly or only known the LED think it's a bit odd, but just call them blue because that's the common convention and many youths may think that the former lights might have actually been blue.
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.
I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.
(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.)
I wouldn't assume most people do that. For me the last few looked basically the same so I selected the same color for all of them.
You can't assume most people do that, but you also can't assume most people do not do that.
My boundary was hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population, for me turquoise is green and then it shows an overall chart which I have to agree with so no, I don't agree with your assessment. I often get into blue/green arguments with my children and that's when I started to suspect that it was personal opinion.
That's if you're matching about 40% of the population.
For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.
That doesn’t explain why I landed 92% off the population median.
it's a binary search, not too surprising. search over a unidimensional ordered space
this made no sense btw, this would give 4/3
This makes no sense. It's like asking:
What if it was phrased differently?
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?"
I recommend this reading: https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...
Someone should make a parody site asking whether shades of yellow are red or violet.
Your example would only be valid if "blue" and "green" had objective answers for when something is Blue and something is Green and have clear demarcated boundaries. You're switching to a literal boundary example where there are actual lines to be crossed. Colors are a fuzzy continuum; national boundaries, not including fought-over areas like the Sea of Japan, are easy to be in or not.
These days the US border might be a fuzzy continuum ;)
> Colors are a fuzzy continuum
Denver is teal, the USA blue-green. Canada is Blue, and Mexico is green.
Their analogy is pretty on point.
You are confusing geographical position with countries.
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.
I'm not confusing anything. I am 1000% unconfused and entirely on the same wavelength as OP.
You're inability to wrap your head around the analogy is tantamount to.. Not being able to comprehend blue-green.
It’s a terrible analogy though.
Wow, crazy to see someone thinking there's an official objective color definition
I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.
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 hereby propose the Turquoise Trolley Problem (TTP):
If you say the trolley is blue, it goes straight, where there's a baby in the tracks. If the trolley is green, two grandmas die.
If you say it's neither, the trolley derails ;)
But what about the definition of aqua outside of any digital color space?
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
This test finds the midpoints of people's spectrum. They're not asking is "is this completely blue or completely green" but rather "is this more blue or green"
This is the wrong way to do it, psychometrically, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929056. You need to provide people gradations, or you get junk responses / abandonment, and your instrument doesn't measure what you think.
It's a fun toy website.
It's ok that there are things you don't understand in the world. It's just as valid for them to exist, as it is you are upset about it.
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.
What a fun site. Obviously results will depend on the monitor. At the last screen picture which show "where is my blue" and the gradient from green to blue I moved it from one monitor to other - what a difference! Time to dig into monitors setting to get more consistency (or for new monitors - do the color change with time? - one is more lit in the morning by sun but other do not get direct sunlight almost at all- both are the same type). What is funny it did not bother me at all - I do not work with any graphics and color. But probably now it will :).
Tried this on 2 monitors, made a difference of 77%-85%
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.
Should this be called "Is my monitor's blue your monitor's blue?"
I got a 98-percentile result and realised my Mac had Night Shift turned on.
Yes, this test only works somewhat if you have multiple people use the same monitor/screen. Otherwise it's mostly useless for accuracy.
And what if you are wearing blue blocker readers? I am, and perhaps unsurprisingly my result was greener than average.
ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
Exactly, and how bright is your display compared to your surroundings at time of viewing?
Maybe both are true, if someone grows up and learns through a specific monitor, maybe that will influence and define their blue definition.
followed by the number of rods and cones in your eyes, as well as their own sensitivity, as well as your language
Interestingly, there are several languages where blue and green are one color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.
The term you're looking for is "qualia" - one's own experience of sensory inputs, which cannot be compared with others' except through allegory.
The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.
I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.
You certainly stumbled onto it much sooner in life than I did. It wasn't until I had children in my late 30s that this dawned on me - and has perplexed me ever since. Funny indeed.
Yup, always wondered this as well! The word for each internal subjective experience is called qualia.
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)
Have I got a Wikipedia article for you!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
Amazing. I'm so glad to have a name for this.
We know for a fact that bees or dogs perceive color very differently. But in between humans, the perception of physical sensations can still be resolved when we consider near-identical genetics.
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 :)
If you want to explore it further, look up the philosophical aspects of the hard problem of consciousness. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
It would be interesting to see if llms all share the same internal representation of red. It might hint towards how it works for humans.
Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.
Chemistry is the same for each of us, as is physics, so I'd be inclined to think that red is the same red for everyone.
You'd be inclined to, but no, of the little we do understand about human perception, we do understand enough by now to say that different people can genuinely experience and perceive the world differently, sometimes wildly so.
Look into aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), anendophasia (lack of inner voice).
I have thought about this many times. The same could be asked about other senses as well like taste, do we both interpret the taste of a banana the same?
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.
Oh wow, I hadn't thought of taste, but you're exactly right. Fascinating subject.
There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_with_a_White_Sun
Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.
I looked up the banknotes since I was curious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_rupiah#/media/File:...
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.
In terms of pass me the blue note, yep. I consider the 2000 and 50000 in your photo as blue.
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...>
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Same with Old and Middle Irish (1200 AD): "glas was a blanket term for colors ranging from green to blue to various shades of gray"
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
In Polish language we commonly call turquoise "lightblue", so instinctively we'll have the boundary not at the middle of the turquoise, but between the turquiose and green, (i got hue 165, 95% of the population). We also call it "sea-color", but sea is also more culturally associated with blue than green.
In French, turquoise is "bleu turquoise", so obviously blue. So I'm not surprised it says "For you, turquoise is blue."
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.
I would love to know if "Cambridge Blue" is actually blue to the average person, because, to me, it's green...
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Blue_(colour)
That's beige, but green.
that's green! whoever invented the name of the colour had a different vision
It's named after Oxford Blue, which is in fact, blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Blue_(colour)
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.
I had a colour-blindness test when I worked at an abattoir.
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.
I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-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.
I feel the same way, after the first couple of responses, I was just thinking it's blue-green. So I just had to pick randomly.
A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.
I suspect that asking people to pick on a visual spectrum would lead to most people clicking closer to the midpoint.
This "test" makes no sense. Cyan, and especially turquoise are neither blue nor green, they are a mix (similar to orange between red / yellow).
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).
72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".
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.
> Your boundary is at hue 164, greener than 94% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
No, turquoise is turquoise!!1
Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.
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-...
There are colors in between blue and green that are neither blue nor green!
Any system of giving names to hues will necessarily use ranges.
I think the intent here is clear in context.
This is great!
Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
How much does display calibration factor into this? I'm fairly confident it must impact the results, but unsure how much error it would introduce.
I always wanted to have a color calibrator and a few years back i bought one.
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.
A lot of the color calibration obsession was from back when panels shipped with truly awful factory calibration. A quick perusal of rtings suggests that most manufacturers try and pre-calibrate their panels these days
Ambient light color would play a bigger part, with modern displays being fairly good.
It's crazy to me that most people don't get it. This is not a "who knows the exact name of this hex color" game, it's "more blue or more green?"
Orange is its own color, but is this hue it 51% red or 51% yellow?
I think this site is doing a binary search, so that you narrow down on a boundary.
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.
My numbers kept varying wildly from 174 to 189, in the same patterns across multiple devices (initial number different from stable next-five results), so I tried a few things.
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.
Interesting. Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
Though everyone calls a solid blue color as blue, the actual visual perception or experience of that color could be entirely different. They just grew up calling that experience of their own, as blue color.
As others have pointed out, the 2nd color is not something I would call either blue or green. Except for the first, it never showed anything I would call blue. So really I have told it the border where I still call something green. So is my green your green?
We never get to find out what the author's blue is
This is flawed. Turquoise is not blue or green. Also different displays will show different colors. And a lot of displays aren’t great at producing the hues in the green color space. Idk the test seems arbitrary, but I’m not color expert
I'm not sure what's going on, but in Chrome my median point is heavily on the blue side but in Safari it's on the Green side. Also, at least in Safari, reset leads to a series of perceptually unchanging turquois screens -- it seems a bug. Refreshing fixes it for the next run.
One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.
That’s assuming that there is something like a “true” internal color that external colors are mapped onto. I think it’s more likely that for the brain, “red” is just “that hue signal range that red things have”. Which is roughly the same for everyone (modulo color blindness), in the sense that if one person sees two objects as red, another person will also see them as the same color, and will perceive the same brightness and hue relation relative to other objects with adjacent brightness and/or hue.
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”.
My suggestion is always to look at what colors people think "go together". A Westerner looking at a Chinese temple will say "ugh, saturated red, light blue, and gold, all together?" My own self looking at a shirt my Eastern European wife loves: "dark blue, gray, and orange, bleah". It suggests that depending on your culture, you may have adopted a different visual response, where blood color is harmonious with sky color, or something like that.
Quite right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
I've got an anecdote that says that they don't.
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.
yep, this is the sort of question I pose to my kids. “How can you know that what you see as blue is not what I see as red?”
I find that fascinating as well! I hope tech will give us the answer in our lifetimes.
It is mentioned on the about page but I still feel like pointing out that your response to this test has as much to do with your perception of colors as how green or blue your screen is and what kind of ambient lighting there is. Especially considering how subtle the differences are in the final rounds of the test.
Still an interesting experiment, but I would be cautious about drawing conclusions about anything from it.
Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?
Can you accommodate with the implant?
No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
"Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population.
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.
Reminds me of the discussions with my wife. She is from Japan and, over there, you cross a traffic light when it's "blue". IIRC, the word was chosen before international agreements, and the colour has shifted towards green since, but it's still more blueish than in other countries. And they still call it "blue".
This is like one of those eye tests where they switch between lenses narrowing in on the prescription. The question is really what shades of turquoise is more blue than green.
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.
I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:
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...
The boundary regions at 3:00, 7:00, and 11:00 are composite colors that have ~2x the brightness compared to the primary colors of red, green, and blue. For someone without a color vision deficiency, they appear brighter than surrounding colors, but the saturation really only varies with distance from the center. For example, to me, the point at 3:00 on the edge of the circle is the peak of a "ridge" in brightness, but appears as a very saturated teal.
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!
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.
I’m not color blind and see a white barrier between 3 sections(it looks like a 3 piece pie) with lines at the green/blue red/blue and green/yellow boundaries.
No idea why
> I'm not color blind
Well... uhm, you may want to verify that claim.
My family has a long genetic history of color blindness so I’ve been tested many times. None of those diagnostics has produced a result of color blindness but perhaps there is some form that’s not been categorized yet.
I came back as with a measure of 174 and a label of "true neutral".
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.
I also got 174. I turned the brightness up on my phone (to about 65-70%) before starting, but that was it. No resetting my eyes between colors. Considering I’m red/green colorblind, and certain hues of green I see as gray, I’m pretty shocked by the result. I suspect having a binary choice helped a lot, as once it was no longer something I could consider blue, I’d call it green.
If you have a spare moment today, look up "wine-dark sea". As far as we can tell, there was no such thing as a _concept_ of blue in Ancient Greece.
Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.
apart from not giving the "neither" option of turquoise, you cannot just line up asking without neutralising perception in between eg. with a non blue/green and then white before the next test. Color perception is >relative< not just across individuals, not sure how someone interested enough in blue perception does not understand this.
> For you, the turquoise is green!
No, turquoise is turquoise. You gave me two options, and you act like I didn't know that word exists
Curious how this looks for red/green colorblind folks?
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.
My blue is in fact what others see as red, and vice versa, but I wasn't able to verify it yet!
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
This is cretinous. There's a well defined colour in between blue and green which is turquoise / cyan. It even says at the end "You see turquoise as x". No I don't, I see it as turquoise. It's like asking is the red or is this yellow without acknowledging the existence of orange. Either rage bait or pure idiocy.
I suggest replacing "is" with "is closer to", since shown color is obviously not blue nor green.
Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see 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
I remember a pic of a shirt, which a former colleague of mine was showing on his monitor ten years ago, and the office splitted half in recognizing the colours, can't remember if they were gold vs black; but we went crazy because nobody could believe that the other half was seeing a colour different from the one they were seeing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
Same here at 82%, although I don’t think I’m seeing blues as black.
I'm at 87%. How would you classify Turquoise (`#40e0d0`) and Dark Turqoise (`#00CED1`)?
I think your monitor or room lighting might just be different from others'
Related:
Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)
Interesting!
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.
I must be colourblind, most of those look the same on my phone.
Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.
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.
In Korean, we have an adjective "푸르다". It is somewhere between blue and green. You can say trees are that, oceans are that. It also means unripe.
Yeah, so to me, tortoise is definitely blue.
Edit: typo tortoise -> turquoise
I did it twice. The first time, I was bluer than 57% the second time I was greener than 63%.
One of my eyes sees (very) slightly greener than the other one.
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.
>> Your boundary is at hue 177, bluer than 76% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.
The About section at the end said most people average around 175.
I forgot that my display is in night mode (reducing blue light intensity). And I ended up with "your boundary is bluer than 98% of the population."
On the third step, this is turquoise and there is no button for that answer.
This is also going to be very difficult because:
* 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.
Your monitor model, screen settings, .. play a significant role in here. Try it on different screens to get different results.
Showing the completion screen and giving the ability to use a slider to pick the center might be more useful.
Some languages don’t make a distinction. And if a language doesn’t have a word for green or blue it won’t have a word for brown or orange either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
In Japanese, the "go" traffic light is referred to as "blue."
Noticing on my monitor that it's more blue if I tiptoe and look down, and it's obviously green when looking at below.
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.
Very relevant complementary reading: https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...
Thanks to the TMS9918, I know cyan when I see it! Years of seeing cyan on a composite monitor where hue is tricky to adjust. My tolerance for the amount of green allowed in cyan is higher. And if it's cyan, it's blue. I see I classified quite a few greenish as cyan therefore blue.
TIL: I mixed up the meaning of turquoise and teal.
I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.
Warm blue vs cool blue is another interesting social question: https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy
I wouldn't call most of those colors green or blue. Most of them looked identical to me as well. I ended up picking arbitrarily for all but the two I thought were distinctly one or the other.
Asinine and meaningless. Forces a classification on something that obviously anyone with fully-functioning colour vision will classify as "aquamarine" or "turquoise" or etc.
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.
>> Your boundary is at hue 173, greener than 57% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called either green or blue.
This is obviously 青.
I don't find this compelling as it seems to me it's well acknowledged there are colors that are BOTH. As in there are colors widely considered to be blue-green. Blue and Green.
This is awesome! I have a slight case of tritanopia in one eye and it was neat to see the difference. My boundary is bluer by 59% in one eye and 87% in the other. It tracks with what I would have expected.
While neat, I don't get consistent scores if I retry it a few times. If it leads with a series of greens first, my score is more green oriented, and vice versa.
The hot debate in my house: is it yellow or green. Is there a test for that?
Used to be red/orange in mine.
The test's gradient does not have even luminence/saturation.
It needs to interpolate between blue and green in the CIELAB color space.
"teal" is the name for color "Moderate bluish green"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal
Yes, and since Teal is Cyan with 50% Value, you will often also see people use Cyan to refer to the boundary color between Blue and Green.
This is really great. Love the chart at the end. Apparently I evaluate heavily toward thinking green is blue.
Witgeinstein's Beetle xD
My mind was blown once when I heard multiple people calling yellow Gatorade (lemon lime) green. I have no clue how anyone perceives it that way.
It looks like this project got forked and updated further https://ismycolor.com/
Interesting, I got a completely different result on green/blue on this one, way more green whereas I got average on the individual test. Going between very different colors makes it hard to reset - they might consider breaks between spectra.
> Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
Pretty sure I accidentally picked blue for a green once.
I was always fascinated by this kind of question as a kid. Like I would imagine that everyone had all the colors mixed up and we were each seeing something different.
If you're not colorblind, yes. More or less.
Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.
This only checks a single brightness level per hue. I bet that two people who agree for those levels might very well disagree at other levels, and vice versa.
I used to own a house in California which I swore was peach, my coworker told me face it the house is pink.
Would be cool to see a gender distribution. Women perceive more colours than men, wonder how it impacts this.
Two different screens (OLED vs LCD), two different results.
Im left delighted to find out something new, but left wanting to know how to use it.
Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
Send it to a significant other, then discuss your differences. Will provide you with a new in-joke.
Also no way to account for the variation of LCD displays. The same "colour" can look different on two different panels
This is stupid without color calibration, or even contrast/brightness levels on your monitor, which can turn these turquoise shades into other colors entirely.
> Your boundary is at hue 172, greener than 63% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
The "exact 50%", or the boundary between green and blue, is nominally hue 180, which is cyan. A search for the RGB, CMYK and HSL for turquoise yielded a few hue values from 171 to 174 (depending who you trust, and allowing for a bit of drift due to colorspace conversions). In any case, 171, 172, 173, and 174 are all on the green side of cyan.
It just keeps showing me the same color over and over.
After 4 clicks, I can no longer decide whether it is green or blue. I would pick "neither" if it were offered
Showed me teal but only have options for blue and green. Teal ain't either.
Fun. Are you accepting PRs? I would love to add a “share” button that shares the color I landed on
I want this but for blue vs. purple.
They're all xanh to me.
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
The xkcd color survey[1] was 16 years ago now. With the data available, there were various follow-ups. Many, including xkcd's own "take it for fun here" link there in [1], are now 404. But the strata[2] and word cloud[3] are still up, and relevant here.
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...
Tried it on two displays, one I’m 82% green, the other I’m 75% blue.
It said that for me Turqouise is blue.. it is not, there was just no option for tuqouise
For some reason, dragging the window makes the chart re-animate.
Also needs a button "this is both" for colors like cyan
Despite all the (valid) criticisms here I just wanted to say that this is a really cool Idea and well executed imo. Thanks for sharing!
hue 174, "true median" .-.
almost got fooled by blue being green or vice versa. nice experiment!
In France turquoise is historically called “bleu turquoise”, so French people would definitely categorize the in-between as blue.
Man doesn’t understand teal the website
Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?
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.
cyan is neither blue nor green
turquoise is green.
people are getting more stupid debate without evidence and logic is rampant the title is the clasic example of word salad, pretending to be valid conjecture , but only exists to cause distraction through "subjectification" or foucault off, already
>"Your boundary is at hue 187, bluer than 97% of the population. For you, turquoise is green"
Problem is that it asks to categorize colors that to me are neither blue nor green
I wonder how much of this is testing people's eyes/brains, and how much is testing their screens.
Can we get this with more different colors.
Like forest green olive green. navy blue.
Also maybe the full color spectrum. And a select set of colors to pick from.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea
When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.
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 think things are green that other people think are grey. Never heard of that with anyone else.
crowd sourced perception research. Love it, OP.
Pro tip, I had my device's blue light filter enabled.
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...
I just took it to mean is this more blue or green rather than literally blue or green. Correct answer is then 180, anything else is clearly a fail :)
I got hue 175 twice, but bluer than 66% of the population once and 59% the second time.
Midori
This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?
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.
This is cyan!
it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.
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
we used to not have a word for orange. we called it yellow red. then this new fruit arrived from India
always blue
I enjoyed this more than I should lol