How blue exactly?

September 2, 2024 6:58 AM

Is my blue your blue?
posted by dhruva (88 comments total)

This is cruel 🤪
posted by Seeba at 7:11 AM on September 2 [4 favorites]

Thanks for this... I used to work in printing and like the discussion about the perception of colour... how it mixes/changes, and how people see it differently.
For this test of blue-green my boundary (today/on my desktop screen) is at hue 175, "bluer than 65% of the population" and it notes that I consider turquoise as "green". Given the 2 options of blue/green, I guess that makes sense for me: add too much yellow and it's no longer blue.
Do they have these for other colours?
posted by Laura in Canada at 7:12 AM on September 2 [7 favorites]

Fun! This is part of perception that I've always found fascinating. One person's orange being another person's yellow, etc.

My result: Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 65% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.

Now, I quibble with the use of the term "turquoise" as there is no actual hard/fast definition of the color, and every stone I've ever seen called "turquoise" has always been firmly more blue than green.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:12 AM on September 2 [7 favorites]

I feel like I was just making stuff up when it was down to the minute changes. Still, fun!
posted by obfuscation at 7:15 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

I've done this 3 times and gotten from right at the median to ~70% bluer than the population soooooo
posted by obfuscation at 7:16 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

I'm 65% too. Not sure what that says about a bunch of people who read a blue website every day.
posted by SoberHighland at 7:18 AM on September 2 [9 favorites]

If you like this, I suggest you pick-up the iOS/android game I Love Hue. It's really fun, especially for those of us whose livelihoods involve color-correction and matching.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:18 AM on September 2 [16 favorites]

@Thorzad, there's also this board game.
posted by Laura in Canada at 7:22 AM on September 2

"Your boundary is at hue 171, greener than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue." Well, teal is one of my favorite colors, and it's blue, right?
posted by pangolin party at 7:22 AM on September 2 [6 favorites]

I love I Love Hue Too!

As always, Wikipedia has further relevant information.

I enjoyed this site, dhruva, thanks for posting.
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:26 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Turquoise is blue! I am much bluer than most people. I guess my metric was "if I saw a swimming pool this color, would I be inclined to describe it as blue", although that might be a little off since one generally does not describe swimming pools as green unless something is quite wrong.
posted by Frowner at 7:35 AM on September 2 [3 favorites]

I'm at 75th percentile pro-blue, but what stood out to me was that I could, in spite of the colorful burst of static, kind of feel the previous colors influencing my perception, and it felt like I had to correct for a pro-green bias. Guess I overcorrected. Presumably, hopefully, the site randomizes whether it starts on green or blue for each respondent.
posted by dick dale the vampire at 7:41 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

This site also works as a top-tier definition of “afterimage” LOL
posted by Thorzdad at 7:45 AM on September 2 [2 favorites]

I, too, got a boundary at "hue 175" and was told that "turquoise is blue".

Which is amusing because I found myself thinking "this is neither blue nor green, this is turquoise" during the test.
posted by egypturnash at 7:49 AM on September 2 [8 favorites]

"My boundary is at hue 182, bluer than 89% of the population. For me, turquoise is green."

Once it got into the boundary waters (ahem) I really want to have other choices, like aqua or teal. Because the color wasn't blue, and it wasn't green. But I had to pick.

I think in those boundary cases I picked "green" rather than "blue" because I'm more of a purist about blue, and I think of green as a more flexible color with more variations. Of course that's not really true -- there are lots of variations of blue. But once it starts have some yellow in it? Bleh, it's not blue any more.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 7:49 AM on September 2 [11 favorites]

I'm extremely blue also, like 85%, because blue has a certain feeling to me, and if it doesn't have that feeling, it isn't blue.

Turquoise might be blue depending on the specific rock (no really go look at that wiki page) so it's kind of interesting that people use turquoise to mean "on the intersection of blue and green" because it isn't definite at all, but that's where we're at I guess, with language. And I guess that teal is generally greener than turquoise, but the duck it's named after isn't just one colour either.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:57 AM on September 2 [3 favorites]

I got "bluer than 98% of the population". I guess I should have been a blues musician.
posted by WalkingAround at 8:00 AM on September 2 [3 favorites]

They should make an ancient Greek version where the choices are Wine-Dark and Bronze.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:00 AM on September 2 [15 favorites]

I got hue 174, median, true neutral. I too found myself thinking "this isn't blue or green" several times during the test.
posted by Dysk at 8:00 AM on September 2 [4 favorites]

86% greener than average. That tracks with traffic lights looking blue to me sometimes.
posted by pattern juggler at 8:06 AM on September 2

76% greener than average on my last go. But I took it a couple of times, and ended up a hue or 2 greener or bluer, depending.

I think turquoise is definitely blue, as is teal, if push comes to shove. Whereas I would be more insistent that purple shades are neither red nor blue. Not clear on why purple/magenta read as a separate colorway to me while cyan still feels mostly blue.

Sorry, Kermit, it really is not easy being green.
posted by the primroses were over at 8:19 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.

Perfect color perception right here!
posted by aneel at 8:23 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Bluer than 65% of the population. My turquoise is green, it says. Well, there is green turquoise and there is blue turquoise so that solves nothing!
posted by Glinn at 8:24 AM on September 2

I took the test twice and got bluer than 85% and 95%, for me turquoise is blue. But also a few years ago, I decided I wanted to give myself some space to call things "indigo" so I picked a shade more towards cyan or sky blue as my default blue. Previously my default would have something closer to blue jeans or ultramarine. The point is, you can just decide to change, and as long as you don't go crazy people will rarely call you on it.

(I did once get into an argument over whether beige was a shade of green.)
posted by surlyben at 8:26 AM on September 2 [4 favorites]

Agree some colors were genuinely blue-green, which is a color between blue and green and was not an option. I believe I chose green for all of those, but an argument could be made that 90% blue is blue.
posted by Glinn at 8:27 AM on September 2

Not clear on why purple/magenta read as a separate colorway

Maybe because purple is not a real* color!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_purples

* ok, ok, "spectral"

Maybe of interest: What makes #9B51E0 purple? (does that count as a self-link?)
posted by aneel at 8:31 AM on September 2 [3 favorites]

Doesn’t the type of screen you view it on make a difference? Are they somehow able to correct for this?
posted by Emmy Noether at 8:32 AM on September 2 [2 favorites]

PepsiBlue! :-) But a fun little exercise. Amazing how such subtle changes can adjust your perception.
posted by davidmsc at 8:45 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Also on team 174.

It would have been nice if they'd explained what their units were. Seems they're using degrees anticlockwise from red on the computer (RGB, as opposed to RYB) colour wheel.
posted by scruss at 8:48 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Have we considered that metafilter might provide a biased sample?
posted by sillyman at 8:49 AM on September 2 [4 favorites]

Sillyman, questions should be posted on the green.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:51 AM on September 2 [9 favorites]

I did it four times and got the same result: "Your boundary is at hue 182, bluer than 89% of the population. For you, turquoise is green."
posted by dobbs at 8:52 AM on September 2

“Blue” is a late-emerging color term in Berlin & Kay’s basic term theory compared to “green”, so I expect the boundary here to be determined by culture more than physiology or even screen technology and retinal afterimages. We are all English speakers here on the blue, but we weren’t all necessarily raised in a language where blue has the same primacy as green.
posted by migurski at 8:53 AM on September 2 [4 favorites]

The second screen was clearly cyan, but if my only choice is green or blue, what to do? I gave up.
posted by Rash at 9:01 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

I did the test on a HDR color-accurate monitor, and my boundary is at hue 180, bluer than 85% of the population. For me, turquoise is green. But, I'd agree: turquoise is green, I'd have told you that if you just asked me.

I wonder how they figure in monitor color temperature and room-light color temperature, both of which will affect perceptions of greens and blues.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:01 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

I got "hue 189, bluer than 98% of the population," but when I look at the final screen, I see a band of green below what I consider blue, but then a hazy band of blue at the midpoint of my screen (before it gets to "true green"). So that seems odd?
posted by unknowncommand at 9:13 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

PepsiBlue! :-)

To you, sure, but it's PepsiGreen for me!
posted by Dysk at 9:21 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Who are all these people in "the population" who call green things blue? (Serious question - it would be great to know what data set this web site is using, and how the responses map to geography, language, operating system, etc)
posted by Winnie the Proust at 9:22 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

I walked away from my screen for a moment to reset my eyes, and happened to find myself staring at the *definitely green* shirt hanging to dry on the clothes airer. Walked back to my desk and realised the colour on the screen was very close to the colour of the shirt. Right then, green it is.

Anyway, so apparently my boundary is at hue 179, bluer than that of 84% of the population. (Which population?) Which is a surprise; I'd have expected to skew the other way.

Needs a Reference Turquoise. Most stones I've seen labelled as turquoise are blue, but some are green.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 9:24 AM on September 2 [2 favorites]

Your lenses yellow with age — which means they pass less of the blue light that reaches them — and the lenses of your two eyes also typically yellow at different rates, which would seem to mean that you'd have a different threshold for seeing blue if you used one eye at a time for the test.

Not to mention things like Viagra which augment the perception of blue.
posted by jamjam at 9:28 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

blue are the feelings that live inside me
posted by HearHere at 9:35 AM on September 2 [3 favorites]

Hunh, I keep testing about 177 each time, so my turquoise is green, but every time I get to the results page, I want to drag that slider harder to the left because there isn't any green on that page, only blue and turquoise! We haven't even gotten to green yet. So turquoise must be blue. It's confusing.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:58 AM on September 2

"Your boundary is at hue 185, bluer than 97% of the population."

I get really particular when shopping for blueish green leds.
posted by Catblack at 10:01 AM on September 2

jamjam: I was considering that, too, since I've had cataract surgery and it was astounding the difference it made it how colorful the world is.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:01 AM on September 2 [2 favorites]

Your screen will affect the results, especially if you have a setting enabled to reduce blue light exposure. ("Night Light" on Android.)

I got 93% bluer with that setting on, and 65% bluer with that setting off. The blue/green gradient shown at the end was noticeably different between the two.
posted by swr at 10:17 AM on September 2 [2 favorites]

"Your boundary is at hue 190, bluer than 98% of the population. For you, turquoise is green."

No, fool. Turquoise is f-ing turquoise!
posted by Lynsey at 10:19 AM on September 2 [2 favorites]

Or cyan. I really don't get this.
posted by Rash at 10:30 AM on September 2

hmmmm.....the color they were showing me clearly wasn't blue. But...it wasn't green either.
posted by leahwrenn at 11:02 AM on September 2 [3 favorites]

“Is this black or white?”
*shows me a bunch of grays*

I question the premise.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:03 AM on September 2 [5 favorites]

I did the test four times and my results are all over the place. I'm not sure what to make of this, am feeling blue, maybe.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:05 PM on September 2

Someone please do this for blue and purple which my partner and I have had years longs arguments about re: a particular blanket in the house.

Then we discovered we were both referring to a different blanket and we agree now. But I still want to know how far apart we are on blue/purple.
posted by brook horse at 1:39 PM on September 2 [2 favorites]

In many cultures around the world, blue and green are not separate colors, but rather hues of the same color, and this is reflected in the language. I live in Japan, and there are separate words for blue (aoi) and green (midori), but one example of them mixed us is the color of traffic lights. When lights turn green, in Japanese it's called blue! Some crossings have an canned announcement, "Aoi ni narimashita," or "The light is blue." But the color of the light itself is perfectly green.
posted by zardoz at 1:50 PM on September 2 [1 favorite]

There was not much difference between the teals.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:48 PM on September 2 [2 favorites]

feh I didn't play this much. For me turquoise just feels like it's own colour and deciding if shades of cyan are blue or green seems wrong
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 3:09 PM on September 2 [1 favorite]

I had cataract surgery on my left eye last Thursday and will have the right eye done in a couple of days. Cataract free left eye is Hue 176, unrepaired right eye is Hue 178. Curiously, both eyes together are Hue 174.
posted by Grumpy old geek at 3:28 PM on September 2 [2 favorites]

At some of the in-between phases I wouldn't call it either blue or green, and it feels like a tough call to pick.
posted by Enturbulated at 3:54 PM on September 2 [2 favorites]

Your boundary is at hue 185, bluer than 97% of the population.

I look at everything to the left of the dotted line and I can't believe some of you people can call any of that blue.
posted by straight at 4:54 PM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Your boundary is at hue 185, bluer than 94% of the population.

Okay, so lotsa right-minded people suddenly taking the test.
posted by straight at 4:55 PM on September 2

I don't know what I did wrong, but it told me turquoise is orange. And then to go fuck myself.
posted by axiom at 5:07 PM on September 2 [4 favorites]

It's worth noting (as above) that the blue/.green thing came relatively late to both Japan and China 青 means green in China and blue in Japan
posted by mbo at 6:28 PM on September 2

Another member of club 174 here, true neutral, like Switzerland except with less army knives. Did we win?
posted by mygothlaundry at 6:58 PM on September 2

I was just talking about this with my husband... It would mess up ROYGBIV but I propose removing Indigo from the rainbow as its own separate color category since hardly anyone uses it, and instead adding Teal.

ROYGTBP
posted by subdee at 7:09 PM on September 2 [4 favorites]

I think it was Newton who decided that the rainbow should be described as having seven colors, mainly for numerological reasons. I'm not certain but I think what Newton labeled as "blue" is what I'd call cyan, or perhaps what you'd call teal, and his "indigo" is what most people would call blue. And on a quick check, Wikipedia seems to support that, with references. So your "ROYGTBP" is probably actually the same colors, more or less, as Newton's "ROYGBIV", just using a more common/modern definition of "blue" than Newton used.
posted by biogeo at 8:42 PM on September 2 [3 favorites]

174, i was born with a heart filled with neutrality
posted by GiantSlug at 9:06 PM on September 2 [1 favorite]

Your boundary is at hue 192, bluer than 98% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.

No it's not, it's fucking turquoise. Also, whether a particular shade of blue-green looks bluer or greener depends very sensitively on the tilt of this crappy old laptop's screen aka its analog global colour correction feature.

This is everything wrong with every survey ever, right there in one neatly wrapped package. Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.
posted by flabdablet at 10:22 PM on September 2 [2 favorites]

Richard of York Gave True Battle Pain
posted by Hermione Dies at 12:39 AM on September 3 [2 favorites]

took this, got hue 181, bluer than 85%, went "oh silly me, I did that with the night vision color correction thing on my phone turned on, otherwise it would've been greener"

turned that off, took it again, got... hue 182 slightly more blue? how even
posted by taquito sunrise at 4:14 AM on September 3 [1 favorite]

I remember that after my cataract surgery blues looked purplish for a while but I must have adjusted based on corrections from my spouse. I’m terrible with colors though … my life has been one long string of people telling me “that’s not black, it’s navy!” So you can imagine the mistakes I’ve made with socks and pants.
posted by caviar2d2 at 4:42 AM on September 3 [2 favorites]

This is also impacted by native language and cultural conventions; although English has terms like turquoise and cyan, I'd argue that the average (i.e. non-designer/artist) person on the street wouldn't use them in daily conversation, and would instead just say "green" or "blue" or "greenish-blue". Also see Blue–green distinction in language (Wikipedia).
posted by Theiform at 5:40 AM on September 3 [1 favorite]

It's all ao to me.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:27 AM on September 3 [1 favorite]

That's a really neat quick little survey, I started at bluer than 75% of the population then settled down to the median a couple times later. XKCD did a similar thing a while ago resulting in a spectrum map of names.

> "Aoi ni narimashita," or "The light is blue." But the color of the light itself is perfectly green.

Are some of them different shades? Google images is showing me some really blue looking traffic lights, but I can't tell if that's just the hue being played up for the sake of a blog article.
posted by lucidium at 11:46 AM on September 3

I'm a 176. I'm intrigued by the fact that all of us on this website have ours pretty far to the green side.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:15 PM on September 3

Your boundary is at hue 171, greener than 72% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

In my experience Japanese traffic lights are green. Are they bluer than the ones here in Canada, I couldn't tell you for sure but when I see them I'm not thinking they're pretty blue.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:19 PM on September 3

Well, maybe this helps with the dress color conundrum from several years ago.
posted by mightshould at 4:13 PM on September 3

Sci Show: The Most Popular Blue in History (Was Ignored By Egypt)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:51 AM on September 4

All human societies do at least two loads of laundry: dark and light. Most have at least one other category: red. In societies which do three loads...
posted by sourcequench at 8:16 PM on September 4 [2 favorites]

Citation needed. I have never in my life separated laundry by colour or anything to do with it. We do one load of laundry: whatever clothes are dirty. Black, white, red, yellow, pastel, bright, whatever, just shove it in the machine drum and let's get on with the good parts of our lives.
posted by Dysk at 12:31 AM on September 5

I got a "turquoise is blue" result in the 70s. I have one cataract; the cataract in the other eye was really bad and had to be removed several years ago. It's a known thing that cataracts make you see things with a yellow cast, and I can tell the difference in color when I look at something with my color-corrected right eye and my yellowy left-eye. This test left me wondering how much of my color perception has to do with the gymnastics my brain does to correct color input now that my eyes see more differently.

The cataract operation also resulted in a significant vision correction for me, from more 5x nearsighted to about 3.5x - 3x nearsighted, and completely flipped which eye is dominant for most visual purposes. I remember being astonished at how quickly my brain learned to cope after 50 years with different visual inputs. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if my brain was compensating or overcompensating for the color effect of the cataract.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 1:08 AM on September 5

All human societies do at least two loads of laundry: dark and light.

When I was a kid, the usual way to talk about separated laundry loads wasn't dark vs light, it was whites vs coloured. Which I guess reflects progress of a sort.

For as long as I've been in charge of buying my own clothes and linens, they've all been dark exactly because the choice between running separated loads and needing to pick contrasting lint off every fucking thing used to piss me off.

Light colours in general and whites in particular are also way more susceptible to acquiring visible stains. You should see Luna after she's been licking out the tray that the butter chicken comes in. She instantly gets her TFG on and her head stays orange for days.
posted by flabdablet at 1:32 AM on September 5

I've noticed that colors that I consider blue in the abstract I might consider green in real life - for instance, I have a striped button down with stripes in a greener turquoise. It's definitely a blue green, and on screen if I had to define it I'd call the color a blue. But when I think of it, I think of it as a shirt with green stripes. If I really look at the shirt and try to focus on the stripes, I think "these are actually a light blue-green", but if I look at the shirt as a whole it seems green and white to me.
posted by Frowner at 11:48 AM on September 6 [1 favorite]

Tsk tsk, Dysk. That's why all your whites are dingy and your blues and greens look alike.

*not to mention white link on your black pants.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:52 PM on September 7

Did this again today on a different screen and got quite a different result... I don't think the numbers are very meaningful when the monitor isn't calibrated.

I did notice something interesting: at some point, I was judging by 'would I use this color to draw water' vs 'would I use this color to draw leaves'. I'm not sure whether that's putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, or simply being pragmatic about a definition that's subjective anyway...
posted by demi-octopus at 4:23 AM on September 8

I was judging by 'would I use this color to draw water' vs 'would I use this color to draw leaves'

What kind of water and what kind of leaves?
posted by flabdablet at 5:27 AM on September 8

> What kind of water and what kind of leaves?

Any leaf that is not a petal, I'd say.

The green in your water picture appears to be duckweed, so falls under the 'leaves' category. 😃
posted by demi-octopus at 10:07 AM on September 8

It's not duckweed, it's blue-green algae.
posted by flabdablet at 10:39 AM on September 8 [1 favorite]

Tsk tsk, Dysk. That's why all your whites are dingy and your blues and greens look alike.

*not to mention white link on your black pants.

This doesn't actually happen with modern dyes. You know they make clothes with stripes? Black and white even. Somehow the black stays black and the white white. Just like the all black top in the machine with the all white one.
posted by Dysk at 7:33 PM on September 8

Duh, I misspell lint as link.

Dysk, I was attempting to tease you. I was kidding.
Just kidding. It fell absolutely flat. Yes, horribly unfunny.

It's OK. Do your laundry anyway you like.
(But I still wouldn't be surprised if you didn't have white lint on black pants. So there! *sticks out tongue
posted by BlueHorse at 8:31 PM on September 8

I don't tumble dry, so lint has never been an issue!
posted by Dysk at 9:43 PM on September 8