Is my blue your blue? (2024)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

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.

...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. ;)

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 am bluer than 78%. Colors. How do they work.

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!

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

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.

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".

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).

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.

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.

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

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

it's a binary search, not too surprising. search over a unidimensional ordered space

> 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.

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?

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.

Looking in dev console reveals that the issue is an error response from https://cdn.skypack.dev/canvas-confetti - at the moment that URL returns:

        A server error has occurred

        FUNCTION_INVOCATION_FAILED

        sfo1::qcpj5-1777386477345-b792e22509f4

I guess it's not a browser issue. I tried firefox, safari and brave on macos and neither worked, even in private window. Bummer.

blank black screen on firefox android

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.

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

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"

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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