I was having a discussion closely related to this recently because of my background in philosophy of language. Languages are function, but not rigid. The rules and referents of "blue" become kind of pointless around the edges, and narrow words like cyan or turquoise 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.

Logically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% 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.

This was exactly my issue. There was no perception issue I could clearly identify the intermediate color as neither truly blue or green.

Taught by whom? I hear parents are wonderful teachers.

Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.

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...

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.

90% here, and it makes sense. I'm very picky about saying something is blue!

...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 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.

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.

You've got the blues.

Same situation happened to me, and I have same test result as you.

> 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

This is the first time I realized that turquoise is the gray area.

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.

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.

100%. It's like being asked is this black or white and being shown 50% grey.

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.

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).

Thats the exact point of this experiment to define the inbetween and move it to either green or blue.

:/

I interpreted the buttons to mean "this is bluer than it is green" and "this is greener than it is blue".

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.

That's if you're matching about 40% of the population.

For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.

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 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

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

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.

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.

The term you're looking for is "qualia" - one's own experience of sensory inputs, which cannot be compared with others' except through allegory.

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)

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.

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.

Have I got a Wikipedia article for you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

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.

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.

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.

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?"

Wow, crazy to see someone thinking there's an official objective color definition

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.

I got a 98-percentile result and realised my Mac had Night Shift turned on.

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

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.

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

Any system of giving names to hues will necessarily use ranges.

I think the intent here is clear in context.

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.

Ambient light color would play a bigger part, with modern displays being fairly good.

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

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.

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.

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”.

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.

I think your monitor or room lighting might just be different from others'

Same here at 82%, although I don’t think I’m seeing blues as black.

Can you accommodate with the implant?

In Japanese, the "go" traffic light is referred to as "blue."

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.

The About section at the end said most people average around 175.

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.

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.

Send it to a significant other, then discuss your differences. Will provide you with a new in-joke.

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.