Is my blue your 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.

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!

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 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.

"for you, turquoise is blue." Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.

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.)

This makes no sense. It's like asking:

    "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.

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)

Interestingly, there are several languages where blue and green are one color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

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.

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?

Should this be called "Is my monitor's blue your monitor's blue?"

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.

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

My blue is in fact what others see as red, and vice versa, but I wasn't able to verify it yet!

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.

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).

> 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

It said that for me Turqouise is blue.. it is not, there was just no option for tuqouise

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.

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?

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.

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.

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-...

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.

There are colors in between blue and green that are neither blue nor green!

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.

On the third step, this is turquoise and there is no button for that answer.

I suggest replacing "is" with "is closer to", since shown color is obviously not blue nor green.

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.

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?

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.

Two different screens (OLED vs LCD), two different results.

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".

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.

TIL: I mixed up the meaning of turquoise and teal.

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

Witgeinstein's Beetle xD

"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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 monitor model, screen settings, .. play a significant role in here. Try it on different screens to get different results.

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.

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.

Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...

This is great!

Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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'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 makes no sense. It's like asking:

    "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.

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?"

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

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.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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”.

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.

Can you accommodate with the implant?

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.

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.

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...

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. ;)

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

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.

You've got the blues.

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