Speaker 1: Hi everybody, This is Chuck here. Happy Saturday.
Speaker 2: I hope you're doing well. Do you want to know
Speaker 2: how color works? There's a lot to it and you
Speaker 2: can learn it all right now. This one is from
Speaker 2: May twenty first, twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4: Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
Speaker 4: Chuck Bryant and Jerry and it's stuff you should know.
Speaker 1: Color and technical color.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which is really something.
Speaker 1: It's tea technical.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, imagine what it was like back then. Oh man,
Speaker 1: I'll debut.
Speaker 4: Just melted people's eyes all bait probably did. You're like, wow,
Speaker 4: how are you doing?
Speaker 1: I'm great.
Speaker 4: I'm glad to hear that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how are you?
Speaker 4: I'm good. I'm tired, but I'm good.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I got to precurely to study.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I had to get up early to make
Speaker 2: the cheese.
Speaker 1: What oh you know it's just saying.
Speaker 4: Don't wait, wait, who's saying, yeah.
Speaker 1: Make the cheese, make the sausage, make the doughnuts.
Speaker 4: I've heard make the doughnuts.
Speaker 1: You never heard make the sausage.
Speaker 4: I've heard you don't want to see how the sausage
Speaker 4: is made.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just pick anything.
Speaker 4: Make the cheese, I don't think so cut the cheese,
Speaker 4: milk the cow. People get up early for that, so
Speaker 4: I guess there's that association.
Speaker 1: Have you ever milked a cow?
Speaker 4: No? Have you? No?
Speaker 2: I was talking to Emily about that the other day
Speaker 2: because we went horse riding and I'd never ridden a
Speaker 2: horse before.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's pretty neat.
Speaker 1: Huh, it's my.
Speaker 2: New favorite thing. Yeah, it was amazing how awesome it was.
Speaker 4: Did you jump over anything on the horse?
Speaker 1: No? But we like, you know, trotted up a hill.
Speaker 4: Did you shoot a bow and arrow?
Speaker 1: No? I almost fell off though.
Speaker 2: And yeah when he trotted up the hill, I got
Speaker 2: like kind of loose in the saddle, as they say.
Speaker 4: I was like, whoa, okay, well that's exactly what you
Speaker 4: should said, as woe.
Speaker 2: Well, no, he was going uphill, so I had to
Speaker 2: just keep on trucking. Really, yeah, I didn't want to
Speaker 2: stop him. Good for you, man, he was carrying a load.
Speaker 2: I felt bad for the horse.
Speaker 4: I'm sure he was fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was all right.
Speaker 4: Yeah what was his name?
Speaker 1: Oh? Man?
Speaker 2: Now I'm kicking myself like a horse because I called
Speaker 2: this horse by his name the whole day, and now
Speaker 2: I can't remember Calvin.
Speaker 1: I thought we'd bonded. I guess I was just pretending.
Speaker 4: That's cool. The horse probably can't remember your name either.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he took a big dump. They do that, right,
Speaker 2: and then just stopped. And I was like, what are
Speaker 2: you stopping for?
Speaker 4: And I was like, oh, oh, you're lucky even stop
Speaker 4: sometimes they just walk and do that.
Speaker 1: Really, all of the ones on our little ride stopped.
Speaker 4: To poop, which I thought was maybe I'm confusing them
Speaker 4: with another animal humans just walking poop at the same time.
Speaker 1: Anyway, it was my favorite new thing. I loved it.
Speaker 4: That's cool, man, I felt very at home. What color
Speaker 4: was the horse?
Speaker 1: The spotted ones, which I love, man.
Speaker 4: I was hoping you were gonna say, like blue or
Speaker 4: red or something easy?
Speaker 1: Did you smashed the table?
Speaker 4: Let's go with blue? Okay, blue?
Speaker 1: It was a blue horse.
Speaker 4: So allow me to explain why your horse appeared blue. Okay,
Speaker 4: As Newton figured out, that horse was not inherently blue.
Speaker 4: There's nothing inherently blue about that horse. Yeah, it's all
Speaker 4: in our perception.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because color technically doesn't exist.
Speaker 4: It exists in our minds.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, the perception of color does exactly, But like
Speaker 2: an apple isn't just there's nothing in the apple that's red.
Speaker 4: Exactly, chuck, And there's nothing in your horse that made
Speaker 4: it blue. Now, what happens is that color is basically
Speaker 4: our perception of a specific wavelength of visible light.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 4: And visible light is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum
Speaker 4: that includes everything from microwaves to radio waves, to gamma rays.
Speaker 1: To ocean waves.
Speaker 4: Not quite, but visible light is part of that wavepools. No, no, no,
Speaker 4: just those things that I said. Okay, So along that
Speaker 4: spectrum is this very narrow little slice that's visible light.
Speaker 4: And invisible light which we see is like white light, sunlight. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it is the presence of the rainbow, which are called
Speaker 4: the spectral colors.
Speaker 1: It's right.
Speaker 2: On one end, you have the short wavelength, which is blue.
Speaker 2: On the other end, you have the long wavelengths, which is.
Speaker 4: Red technically violet.
Speaker 2: On the other side, well, red has a bunch of
Speaker 2: different names. When you start reading in the color.
Speaker 4: Well, no blue on the blue side, it's like starts
Speaker 4: at violet. But we don't perceive it very well.
Speaker 2: Oh well, I'm talking about what humans can see, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then everything else is in between.
Speaker 4: Right, and what's really in the middle, Like yellow, Maybe
Speaker 4: it seems like yellow is kind of in the middle.
Speaker 1: Yeah. When you think, you tell me.
Speaker 4: Well, on the other end, beyond violet, you've got ultraviolet,
Speaker 4: and beyond red, you've got infrared.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these are things we can't see.
Speaker 4: No, we can't. Some animals can, remember they think monarch
Speaker 4: butterflies are able to migrate all the way to Mexico
Speaker 4: using ultraviolet detecting ultraviolet. I remember that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, man, that was a good episode, pretty amazing.
Speaker 4: So this band of light, this visible spectrum, contains the
Speaker 4: spectral colors which we perceive, right, And for a very
Speaker 4: long time, everybody just thought, well, that apple's red or
Speaker 4: that horse is blue. That's just how it's born. There's
Speaker 4: nothing that can be done about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then like we said, along came Newton, and Newton said, no,
Speaker 4: something weird's going on here. Like you said, color doesn't
Speaker 4: really exist. It's in the eye of the beholder almost literally. Yeah, right,
Speaker 4: And the reason why an apple seems red or your
Speaker 4: horse seems blue are because of natural chemicals found in
Speaker 4: say the skin of the apple or the hide to
Speaker 4: the horse. That are called pigments. So in an apple, specifically,
Speaker 4: it's anthrocyanins that make it red. In the case of
Speaker 4: a carrot, it's carotenoids, in the case of grass, it's chlorophyll.
Speaker 4: And these pigments have the capability of absorbing some wavelengths
Speaker 4: of light and reflecting others back. And the wavelength that
Speaker 4: it reflects back are the colors that we perceive.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: And that's if it's an object that is opaque.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, that's a big one right there. Yeah, apples
Speaker 4: are pretty opaque.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say, so that's your Superman maybe.
Speaker 4: Yeah, heats invisible see through apples. Oh yeah he can.
Speaker 4: Can I get your joke now? So yeah, with an
Speaker 4: opaque object, where light doesn't pass all the way through,
Speaker 4: some lights reflected back. So in the case of anthracyanins,
Speaker 4: this pigment absorbs all the other wavelengths of light except red,
Speaker 4: and it reflects red back, and so red is reflected back.
Speaker 4: So what you see when you look at this apple
Speaker 4: with all the red light reflecting back at you is
Speaker 4: a red apple, that's right. That's how we perceive color
Speaker 4: in the world around us. Naturally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if it's transparent, it's not reflecting that light
Speaker 2: but transmitting it. So it depends on the color of
Speaker 2: light that's passing through it instead of reflecting back to you.
Speaker 1: Yes, and again it's that chemical makeup.
Speaker 2: It operates in sort of the same way, right, It's
Speaker 2: just not like in an apple skin, let's say.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. But it all comes to do It comes
Speaker 4: down to basically pigments or whatever natural chemical or mineral
Speaker 4: that either absorbs or reflects certain wavelengths of light.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 4: So here's the thing though, Chuck, Like that can happen
Speaker 4: all day long, and as long as there's not a
Speaker 4: human or a monkey, or a dolphin or a dog,
Speaker 4: because dogs are not colorblind, that's right. They see and
Speaker 4: colors than we do, but they're not color blind.
Speaker 1: I always wonder how they do this tests animals.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a good question.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure it's pretty easy to find out,
Speaker 2: but I just didn't have time to look into it.
Speaker 4: I'm with you. Yeah, this is like in massive black
Speaker 4: hole of information, Like you could just keep going and
Speaker 4: going and going with colors such a huge expansive topic
Speaker 4: that we could just do nothing, but color episodes for
Speaker 4: the next several months. If we wanted to do you
Speaker 4: want to kill me?
Speaker 1: I may not make it through today's.
Speaker 4: So you're doing great. This is fine, This is great, Chuck.
Speaker 4: It is a very like big subject. Yes it is, man,
Speaker 4: We're just we're providing a brief overview of it.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 4: So, like I was saying, things can reflect color all
Speaker 4: the time, but as long as there's not something there
Speaker 4: to perceive it, is there any Is there really any
Speaker 4: color there? Well that's a philosophical question, but there's an
Speaker 4: answer to it, and the answer is no.
Speaker 1: If a tree falls in the woods and no one's
Speaker 1: around to hear, it doesn't make a noise.
Speaker 4: No. Actually, my opinion on that one is yes, okay.
Speaker 4: But with color, yeah, it doesn't exist without being perceived.
Speaker 4: I think. Yeah, sound to me is different than.
Speaker 1: It's a bit of a brain melter. But I see
Speaker 1: what you're saying.
Speaker 4: Okay. So that leads you to the question of how
Speaker 4: do we see color? And that wasn't figured out until
Speaker 4: the eighteenth century, and it wasn't proven I think, until
Speaker 4: the sixties. And there were a pair of guys who
Speaker 4: were a dynamic duo. If I've ever heard of one before,
Speaker 4: and what were their names?
Speaker 1: Well, Thomas Young, he was I thought he was kind
Speaker 1: of the main guy. I had never heard of.
Speaker 4: The other guy, Hermann von Helmholtz.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Thomas Young. What I read was that he was
Speaker 2: the first to propose the trichromatic theory. Basically that we
Speaker 2: see everything through red, green, and blue channels because that's
Speaker 2: how our eyes pick up on color.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because we have specialized cells in our eyes called cones, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: I think we have something like one hundred million or
Speaker 4: some ridiculous amount of rods. And rods are the things
Speaker 4: that we see in like fine detail, black and white typically, right. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Cones are color perceiving cells, and each cell is specialized
Speaker 4: to you either attuned to wavelengths that red, green, or blue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have way more rods than cones, about one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty million rods in each eye and only
Speaker 2: only about six million cones in each eye.
Speaker 4: And those cones are concentrated mostly in the front of
Speaker 4: your retina, Yeah, in the middle, right, which is why
Speaker 4: you don't see color peripherally quite as well.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 4: So these cells are attuned to different wavelengths, right. The
Speaker 4: long wavelengths are red, medium is green, and short is blue.
Speaker 1: I thought you said medium was yellow.
Speaker 4: No, that's in the middle.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, right, so medium is not in the middle.
Speaker 4: Well as far as our RGB goes, gotcha, okay. And
Speaker 4: so with these cells, Chuck, if you're looking at your
Speaker 4: blue horse, what was his name, Calvin the blue horse. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so if you're looking at Calvin the blue horse, you're
Speaker 4: getting a lot of information on from short wavelength light, yes,
Speaker 4: not so much at the long or medium wavelengths, right,
Speaker 4: And so there's probably a little bit it's not a
Speaker 4: true blue horse, right, which would mean that it was
Speaker 4: a totally saturated blue, which is only that blue wavelength,
Speaker 4: true blue wavelength coming to your eyes, there's probably a
Speaker 4: little bit of green, a little bit of red. And
Speaker 4: so all the cones in your eyes are getting all
Speaker 4: this information at once, and they're reporting to your brain
Speaker 4: via electrical impulses about the quality of the wavelengths of
Speaker 4: light that they're getting, and so your brain takes it
Speaker 4: and basically it becomes a color mixer and creates the
Speaker 4: color blue that you're seeing Calvin as Yeah, that's how
Speaker 4: we detect color. And from the r and the G
Speaker 4: and the B you can put together. Supposedly, the Commission
Speaker 4: on Illumination, a European Commission on illumination back in nineteen
Speaker 4: thirty one determine that humans can see something like two
Speaker 4: point three eight million colors.
Speaker 1: Oh, i'ds up to one hundred million, now.
Speaker 4: Is it? Because I've seen all over the place in
Speaker 4: this The nineteen thirty one CIE findings are the ones
Speaker 4: that people say, this has the best science behind it.
Speaker 2: Oh really, yeah? Yeah, so one hundred million, no, I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: ten million.
Speaker 4: Okay, okay. The other thing about the CIE is that
Speaker 4: people say, well, this was only under certain types of illumination.
Speaker 4: I think three different types of illumination, so it is
Speaker 4: entirely possible if you change the intensity or whatever, you're
Speaker 4: going to have brand new color. So ten millions reasonable, Okay.
Speaker 4: That's a lot of colors that we can see, all
Speaker 4: from the red, the green, and the blue cones coming
Speaker 4: together and your brain adjusting them and seeing, oh, well
Speaker 4: that's burnt sienna.
Speaker 1: I know you're gonna say that, did you. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: sort of the go to joke color, right it is.
Speaker 4: It's pretty joky color.
Speaker 2: It's a good one. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Ten million colors,
Speaker 2: or let's say it's two million, if you're going by
Speaker 2: the nineteen thirty one model.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, the CIE naming convention.
Speaker 1: Shall we talk about some of the characteristics of color.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but let's take a break first. This is getting heavy,
Speaker 4: all right, okay.
Speaker 5: Saish all right.
Speaker 2: So if you actually you can do this on your
Speaker 2: modern television as well, But it seemed like most TV's
Speaker 2: now kind of come fairly set up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but in the old days, when you had those.
Speaker 2: Little wheels to try and get that color right, it
Speaker 2: was you know, you might have noticed things that said
Speaker 2: hue and intensity or value or tone and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: Those are all color characteristics. Yeah, and Hugh specifically is
Speaker 2: I mean, that's basically what the color is. It's not
Speaker 2: the lightness or the darkness. It's you know, it's the
Speaker 2: greenness or the redness or the blueness, right, that's the hue.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's what you can interchange that word with color.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I like how they refer to it as
Speaker 2: the identity of a color.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds kind of personal.
Speaker 2: The intensity is how pure it is. So, like we said,
Speaker 2: most colors are mixes. You know, they bleed one way
Speaker 2: or the other on the wavelength, but in its purest
Speaker 2: form a single wavelength, which is really rare, that would
Speaker 2: be the purity or the intensity.
Speaker 1: Of the color.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna see that very.
Speaker 4: Often though, No, And I was wondering, like, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 4: There's some physics labs some where that can produce pure
Speaker 4: saturated green like unadultterated green or unadultraated blue.
Speaker 1: There is, or you're saying, I'm sure it's got to be.
Speaker 4: There has to be. Yeah, probably that has got to
Speaker 4: be really something to see. To know, you're looking at green,
Speaker 4: like nothing but green. I would like to see that sometime.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I have I'm not color blind, but I
Speaker 2: have a more difficult time picking out other hues in
Speaker 2: a color, whereas Emily's really good, like when picking out
Speaker 2: paint colors, like that gray has this and this and
Speaker 2: this in it, and I'm like, really like I see gray.
Speaker 4: Well, supposedly a lot of people have a color deficiency.
Speaker 1: I might have a slight color deficiency.
Speaker 4: And a lot of people don't realize it. Well, yeah,
Speaker 4: a lot of people don't realize that. They think that
Speaker 4: this just this color just looks like this and thinks
Speaker 4: everybody sees it that way and that's not the case.
Speaker 4: And then it comes from a conversation where they're like, well,
Speaker 4: wait a minute, what do you mean you see a
Speaker 4: distinction between those?
Speaker 2: Well, but yeah, but in my case, it's hues. It's
Speaker 2: not like I see a completely different color, right, or you.
Speaker 4: Know, black, or everything's just looks gray.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I did a brain stuff on color blindness. That's pretty interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I went to research that one time for a show
Speaker 2: and it would just like bent my mind so much
Speaker 2: I quietly filed it away.
Speaker 1: So I'm sure you'll pick it next week.
Speaker 4: Color blindness, Uh huh.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Value is the lightness or darkness of a color, and
Speaker 2: that's basically has to do with light, the energy of
Speaker 2: the light that makes it up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the value is so hues. There's really just
Speaker 4: kind of a finite, very finite number of colors of hues, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And you think of like primary colors, which we'll talk
Speaker 4: about soon. But when you adjust something, when you adjust
Speaker 4: the value of it, yeah, that just creates a whole
Speaker 4: new range of colors. So if you add a little
Speaker 4: black to a color, what you're doing is shading it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: If you add white, you are creating a tint.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then if you add black and white a gray,
Speaker 4: you're toning it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, And I think people interchange those words without
Speaker 2: understanding what they mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but they are definite distinct things, and that we
Speaker 4: should probably say. There's a lot of really neat sites
Speaker 4: on the internet. Pantone is a really good one, yeah,
Speaker 4: where you can go look at color wheels and things
Speaker 4: like that and see the distinction between these things and
Speaker 4: be like, oh, you mean pastels. That's another word for
Speaker 4: a tone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's a lot of people really get into
Speaker 2: it because it's the basis of printing and art and photography,
Speaker 2: and like every every sort of art form, well not
Speaker 2: every art form, but many art forms boil down the color.
Speaker 2: So if you go to art school, you're going to
Speaker 2: study color pretty deeply, yeah, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And one of the things you're going to study
Speaker 4: is color theory. And color theory is based done the
Speaker 4: idea that certain colors contrast one another, certain colors complement
Speaker 4: one another, certain colors should never be used together. And
Speaker 4: not that it's just you know, your instructor serge saying no,
Speaker 4: these colors don't go together. It's not just Serge's opinion, right,
Speaker 4: These are objective facts as far as color theory goes. Sure,
Speaker 4: And it's all based on the idea that all colors
Speaker 4: fall into one of two categories. You have additive colors
Speaker 4: and subtractive colors.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a couple of I mean, there's two
Speaker 2: distinct applications for both of these. If you're talking about
Speaker 2: a computer screen or a television that's using light, so
Speaker 2: it's additive. If you're talking about paint or photography that's subtractive.
Speaker 4: Right, So you can think of it this way. With
Speaker 4: additive colors, you're starting with black and you're adding light
Speaker 4: to it, and ultimately, when you add all these additive
Speaker 4: colors together, you're going to have white. With subtractive colors,
Speaker 4: you start with white, and when you add all these
Speaker 4: colors together, you're ultimately gonna have black. And they subtract
Speaker 4: by absorbing one another's colors.
Speaker 2: Another color mind bender two because with subtractive color, you're
Speaker 2: still adding colors, but it's not additive, right, But they're
Speaker 2: sort of have to wrap your head around that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but they're subtracting wavelengths by combining colors and absorbing.
Speaker 1: Them, right, Yeah, it takes a hue out.
Speaker 4: So a really good example of subtractive colors is if
Speaker 4: you take cyan. Cyan absorbs orange, red, right right, So
Speaker 4: if you take cyan and you mix it with yellow,
Speaker 4: you produce green. And the reason that cyan and yellow
Speaker 4: produce green is because the cyan absorbs the red light
Speaker 4: and the yellow light. The yellow absorbs blue violet, and
Speaker 4: so the only color that's not subtracted or absorbed is green.
Speaker 4: So green is produced from these other pigments absorbing all
Speaker 4: the other wavelengths. Yeah, and with it additive coloring, additive pigments.
Speaker 4: It's it's quite the opposite. You have light combining to
Speaker 4: form new colors. Rather than absorbing, you're adding to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like the apple is an example, like we
Speaker 2: said earlier, of a subtractive color system. And again, like
Speaker 2: a TV screen would be additive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think we got that. Yeah, I mean it
Speaker 4: is mine bending a little.
Speaker 1: Bit some of the stuff, you know, I have to
Speaker 1: read like ten times and then it sinks in.
Speaker 4: But the reason that all colors can be turned into
Speaker 4: either additive primaries or subtractive primaries is that these are
Speaker 4: the six colors of these, they're the six spectral colors.
Speaker 4: They're the rainbow colors. Right. So additive primaries are what red, green,
Speaker 4: and blue.
Speaker 1: RGB.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then the subtractive colors are cyan, yellow and magenta.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna say magenta.
Speaker 4: They're almost like bizarro colors. They're the bizarro world primary colors.
Speaker 4: When you think of primary colors, you think of like
Speaker 4: the the what red, yellow, and blue is what most
Speaker 4: people think of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Red, yellow, and blue were the traditional primaries, and
Speaker 2: they still are, but when it comes to like painting
Speaker 2: and printing, they've been replaced with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
Speaker 4: Right, cmyk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you go to your clubhouse printer, Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: what you're gonna be.
Speaker 4: Seeing, cmyk. Or you can select RGB as well, red, green,
Speaker 4: and blue.
Speaker 2: So Crosby Stills Nash and Young, right, right, or Crosby
Speaker 2: Stills in Nash.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's the difference.
Speaker 4: That's a good rule of thumb.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: All right, So we mentioned primary colors just a second go,
Speaker 2: and then we have our secondary colors green, orange, and
Speaker 2: purple hues, which you get from mixing the primary colors, right,
Speaker 2: and then you have something called tertiary colors, which is
Speaker 2: just furthering the color hues by mixing primary colors with
Speaker 2: secondary colors.
Speaker 4: Right, So the six tertiary colors and the two sets
Speaker 4: of primary colors or the six secondary colors I think,
Speaker 4: and the two sets of primary colors form the color
Speaker 4: wheelers twelve colors in the color wheel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and tertiary colors are the ones that you'll hear
Speaker 2: like blue green or red violet. Yeah, it's like literally
Speaker 2: named the two colors.
Speaker 4: And color naming is another rabbit hole that you can
Speaker 4: go down. There's a sight. Man, I wish I'd written
Speaker 4: it down, but it's if you type in like who
Speaker 4: names colors or color naming or something like that in Google.
Speaker 4: Like one of the first page entries is the site
Speaker 4: that you go through and it shows you different colors
Speaker 4: and you write what you would name that color? Oh, interesting,
Speaker 4: butter yellow or something like that, right, and the whole
Speaker 4: well that was as as far as I got. I'm like,
Speaker 4: well I would call this butter yellow, and you got
Speaker 4: hungary had other things to do. But you can go
Speaker 4: through in this. I think it's like ten or twenty
Speaker 4: different shades that they show you colors that they show you,
Speaker 4: And the whole purpose of all this is to find
Speaker 4: some sort of commonality to create universal, universal naming convention
Speaker 4: for colors. Yeah, it makes sense because you know, there
Speaker 4: is a lot of distinction among languages for naming colors.
Speaker 4: But at least one study that I found decided that
Speaker 4: all colors universally for societies that do recognize individual colors,
Speaker 4: rather than these are just warm colors and these are
Speaker 4: cool colors. Yeah, which is universal. The more primary the color,
Speaker 4: the shorter and easier to remember the name of it is,
Speaker 4: like across cultures. So not all cultures will call it blue,
Speaker 4: But what a culture is going to have like another
Speaker 4: like short monosyllabic name for that color, for the same
Speaker 4: thing that we would call blue.
Speaker 1: Oh that's pretty interesting, Yeah, just because it's easier to understand.
Speaker 4: It's just it's basic, like colors appear to be basic universally.
Speaker 2: All right, I think we should take another break and
Speaker 2: maybe come back and talk a little bit about how
Speaker 2: colors can compliment each other and live in harmony and
Speaker 2: what that all means to us.
Speaker 3: Okay, s.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back.
Speaker 4: We sure are.
Speaker 2: So we talked about the different primary color, secondary, and tertiary.
Speaker 2: And there's also something called complementary colors, which are basically
Speaker 2: contrasting colors that make a neutral color when put together, right,
Speaker 2: and they are really far apart in hue, as far
Speaker 2: apart as they can be. And there if you look
Speaker 2: at the color wheel, they're on the complete opposite side
Speaker 2: from one another, right, And when you place them next
Speaker 2: to each other, then their hue is like, I guess.
Speaker 1: It's just more robust looking, yes, because they complement.
Speaker 4: One another, right, Yeah, complimentary doesn't necessarily mean like, oh,
Speaker 4: they look great together under all circumstances. So some complementary colors,
Speaker 4: like red and green, if you play them next to
Speaker 4: each other in the same intensity and the same size,
Speaker 4: it's another one. Yeah, you are going to have what's
Speaker 4: called an iceore. I have a shirt like that. It's
Speaker 4: just too much equal amounts of bright red and bright green.
Speaker 1: Trying to think of that shirt.
Speaker 4: It's just a Christmas shirt?
Speaker 1: Is it retired?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Well for the holiday.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a holiday. Sure, Okay, But the whole point
Speaker 4: of having colors and using colors together isn't just like, well,
Speaker 4: these two are opposite the color wheels, So I'm going
Speaker 4: to use them and equal amounts and equal intensity and
Speaker 4: everything will be great. You have to achieve what's called
Speaker 4: color harmony, and in doing that, you want to choose
Speaker 4: different different shades or different tones or different tints, and
Speaker 4: also different amounts at once. So like you're going to
Speaker 4: use a bunch of red and a little bit of
Speaker 4: green as an accent. That would be much more harmonious
Speaker 4: than equal amounts of intense red and green next to
Speaker 4: each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again this is when we say it's not
Speaker 2: a matter of taste. That's like picking something out as
Speaker 2: a matter of taste. But again, these are like scientific rules.
Speaker 2: You can't just throw two colors together and say that
Speaker 2: looks great or that they're harmonious.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess you could, but you'd be wrong.
Speaker 4: You would surge would be like you're wrong. This is
Speaker 4: objective stuff.
Speaker 1: And then with complimentary colors.
Speaker 2: Getting back to that, there's this really cool thing that
Speaker 2: they bring up called retinal fatigue. So you can do
Speaker 2: a little experiment at home that's kind of blows your mind,
Speaker 2: but it really illustrates how color works pretty well. If
Speaker 2: you look at a bright red spot for about a minute,
Speaker 2: your retinas are going to soak in all that red,
Speaker 2: all those cones are and then when you go immediately
Speaker 2: and look at a white surface, you're going to see
Speaker 2: green briefly, right, not forever, right.
Speaker 4: And the reason why is because your red cells have
Speaker 4: just been basically overstimulated and they're going to respond weakly
Speaker 4: to the information that they're getting from that white right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: And your blue and green cells are going to be
Speaker 4: functioning just fine, so they're going to easily overwhelm your
Speaker 4: red cells. And so what you'll see is this ghost
Speaker 4: image of like a cyan square.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is why. And the reason why is because
Speaker 2: red is the complement of green. It'll always be that opposite, right.
Speaker 1: It doesn't just like randomly pick out a color.
Speaker 4: I know. And if you start adding all this stuff
Speaker 4: together that there are objectively complementary colors that you see
Speaker 4: when you see too much of the opposite one, doesn't
Speaker 4: it all seem to fit so cleanly together that you're
Speaker 4: almost like what is going on here?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 4: What is color? Why do we see color?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: It's a really good question, and evolutionary biologists have not
Speaker 4: been able to explain it fully.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess I really never thought about that because
Speaker 2: there's well, I mean there's probably some evolutionary benefit, right, sure,
Speaker 2: Like green things are generally good to eat.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but green is also the kind of a universal
Speaker 4: color for disgust or sickness or illness.
Speaker 1: Oh like you're green because you're.
Speaker 4: Green around the gills or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4: Green is often like the color of rot grass. But
Speaker 4: it's true. I mean, it's both. So how do we
Speaker 4: evolve to understand the nuanced and I mean clearly if
Speaker 4: we didn't evolve too sea in color so that we
Speaker 4: could do this we have as a byproduct of it,
Speaker 4: but we can very easily tick off whether something is
Speaker 4: healthy for us dangerous. We get a lot of information
Speaker 4: about an object in our environments quality and desirability based
Speaker 4: on its color. It's almost like a shorthand that our
Speaker 4: brains pick up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And part of that is because we're conditioned after
Speaker 2: years of using green for go and green for safe passage,
Speaker 2: and like red or orange for hazard signs and stop signs.
Speaker 2: So part of that's conditioning. But as far as like
Speaker 2: going back many many years before we made stop signs,
Speaker 2: I have no idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, it really makes you wonder and even
Speaker 4: like the idea that pink is for girls in blue
Speaker 4: is for boys, that's a fairly recent development. Prior to
Speaker 4: I think the early twentieth century, it was the opposite.
Speaker 2: Did we ever do that as a show or didn't
Speaker 2: know it's too short? I think we did, like a
Speaker 2: video one or something, didn't we Maybe I seem to remember.
Speaker 4: That, But it was the opposite until like the nineteen
Speaker 4: hundred's interesting, Yeah, yeah, that's interesting totally.
Speaker 1: Is that's why you rock your pink shirts?
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, right, that's exactly why.
Speaker 1: That in fashion.
Speaker 2: So getting back to harmonious colors if they are side
Speaker 2: by I mean this is if you're like picking out
Speaker 2: colors in your house or whatever, if you're not very
Speaker 2: good at it, there are a few hard and fast
Speaker 2: rules colors that are and get your little color wheel
Speaker 2: out is really handy. If they're side by side, they're
Speaker 2: going to harmonize well. And like we mentioned, colors directly
Speaker 2: across from one another, complimentary ones also go well in
Speaker 2: the right proportions because, like you said, the size of
Speaker 2: it makes a big difference. They point out in the article.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you've ever seen someone who's like
Speaker 2: painted their room red, like in college. You know, some
Speaker 2: stupid room mate would do that. It's an assault on
Speaker 2: your senses because you're not used to seeing that much red, right,
Speaker 2: But maybe an accent wall and a shade of red
Speaker 2: matched with a complementary color. You wouldn't want to red
Speaker 2: in green rim though, I guess green is complimentated or red.
Speaker 4: No, but you could conceivably say, use the complementary color
Speaker 4: for like the trim or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And then tints and shades and tones of
Speaker 2: the same.
Speaker 1: Color are always okay together.
Speaker 2: It's never gonna clash, but you're just gonna have to
Speaker 2: mess around with like how much of one compared to
Speaker 2: the other and what pleases your eye?
Speaker 1: Right, Yes, so there is. You can't clash though.
Speaker 4: No, And so again Surge is saying, like, no, there's
Speaker 4: objective truth as to complementary colors and harmonious colors, but
Speaker 4: there is also personal preference. Oh sure, And this is
Speaker 4: kind of like the thorn in the side of the
Speaker 4: whole idea of color psychology that people use colors to
Speaker 4: manipulate other people into like buy a product or whatever.
Speaker 4: Study after study keeps finding that color preferencing color symbolism, Yeah,
Speaker 4: is extremely personal. It's based on past experience, on your upbringing,
Speaker 4: on your culture. Like for example, here in the West,
Speaker 4: we wear black for mourning.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well in the East, white is the color for morning.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of culturally bound ideas about color too,
Speaker 4: which keeps it from being like universally symbolic or whatever.
Speaker 4: But that being said, there are some that just from
Speaker 4: being exposed to it time and time again, like a
Speaker 4: red stoplight that you come to identify symbolically with other stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And colors will also affect everyone differently mood wise,
Speaker 2: but there are some generalities there too, Like blue is
Speaker 2: generally a soothing color that will calm you down. Too
Speaker 2: much though could actually have the opposite effect, like too
Speaker 2: much blue.
Speaker 4: On some or it can really depress you.
Speaker 1: What blue can Yeah? I wonder if that's why they
Speaker 1: say you're blue?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, I mean think about we describe our world
Speaker 4: like that green with envy. Blue means you're down in
Speaker 4: the dumps.
Speaker 2: Red means you're angry, yeah, red faced, yeah, or red
Speaker 2: neck light.
Speaker 4: That's different, it's a little different.
Speaker 2: Warm colors, reds and yellows can also lift the spirits
Speaker 2: if you're less excitable. And they say that most people
Speaker 2: want to just strike a balance though, between the cool
Speaker 2: and the warm.
Speaker 4: Right, and that's when it comes to like personal preference. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but the idea behind this is that a lot of
Speaker 4: people don't realize this is going on, that they're being
Speaker 4: affected by color, even though they are. That it's on
Speaker 4: a very unconscious level.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it also depends a lot on light, like
Speaker 2: how much light a room has coming into it, because
Speaker 2: you're gonna because sunlight is different than artificial light, your
Speaker 2: shirt's going to look a different color outside in the
Speaker 2: sun as it might.
Speaker 1: And I remember when we did the TV show there
Speaker 1: was a lot of.
Speaker 2: With colors and stuff, you know, things would look different
Speaker 2: outside than they would under studio lights.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: What's neat though, is we humans have developed this trick
Speaker 4: called color constancy, where if you look at something, even
Speaker 4: if it's in the shadow or in the sunlight, it
Speaker 4: should conceivably look like different colored things because of the illumination.
Speaker 4: But to us, we're still like, no, that's still green,
Speaker 4: just because there's you know, shadow blocking it. Now, I
Speaker 4: still see it as green. It doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 4: and it's kind of perplexed I guess biologists for a
Speaker 4: while trying to figure out what this is yor neurologists,
Speaker 4: and they figured out that, yes, it is in the brain.
Speaker 4: And there was this one guy who had some sort
Speaker 4: of brain damage, I think from an electric shock, and
Speaker 4: he also went for all intentsive purposes blind, but he
Speaker 4: could still see color. What but he didn't have color constancy.
Speaker 4: So they figured out that this guy was detecting wavelengths
Speaker 4: of light color even though he couldn't see anything. He
Speaker 4: could see colors still, but color constancy wasn't there. So
Speaker 4: they figured out, well, that means that it's a trick
Speaker 4: of the brain. Huh, very neat.
Speaker 1: It's very cool.
Speaker 2: They also bring up in the in the House off
Speaker 2: Works article something I think is pretty interesting, how certain,
Speaker 2: because of conditioning, certain colors can just appear to be wrong.
Speaker 1: Like if you were to pull up and see a
Speaker 1: green stop sign, it would freak you out.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Or the example they used to hear is if you
Speaker 2: cracked an egg and there was a green egg yolk,
Speaker 2: that would be really freaky too, because you're just so
Speaker 2: used to that yellow, right, you know.
Speaker 4: You'd think, well, this is diseased or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or doctor seust right, you know what else you got?
Speaker 1: Did you look at that thing on pigment?
Speaker 4: I did. There's some wacky ways people have made pigments.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean pigment as far as making paint in things.
Speaker 2: Now they're synthetic, you know, like their synthesizing laboratories, which
Speaker 2: makes sense. But throughout all of history, up until they
Speaker 2: started doing that, they were actual real things in the
Speaker 2: ground and on the earth that they would grind up
Speaker 2: into powder. In the case of blue, there was a
Speaker 2: semi precious stone called er there still is called Lapis
Speaker 2: lazuli that was found all over the place in Afghanistan,
Speaker 2: and that's how they made blue.
Speaker 1: Or Azureite is a blue mineral of copper.
Speaker 2: So all of them, most of them have a few
Speaker 2: different ways they could make it red. I think we've
Speaker 2: talked about cinnabar before. The mineral is where you get
Speaker 2: vermilion red and carmine. Carmine is bright red and that
Speaker 2: comes from aluminum salt of carminic acid. So it's just
Speaker 2: crazy that they found all these things in the world
Speaker 2: to make. And I know blue is the toughest one
Speaker 2: because you don't see blue very much in nature. I
Speaker 2: think blue is the one you will see least in
Speaker 2: the primary colors as far as nature goes, like some insects,
Speaker 2: but like there's no blue food.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's true. Blue horses, No, Well what about mine?
Speaker 4: My favorite was India yellow, where they would feed cows
Speaker 4: nothing but mango leaves and then collect their urine and
Speaker 4: then boil it down, then filter out the concentrated muck
Speaker 4: and then make balls out of it. And there was
Speaker 4: the basis of your pigment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff.
Speaker 2: So those are just a few if you really get
Speaker 2: into pigments, and you can like go crazy trying to
Speaker 2: figure out where they all came from.
Speaker 4: Definitely, And I mean again, this is like really just
Speaker 4: the surface of color. There's so much to it, and
Speaker 4: I strongly advise you to go out and learn more
Speaker 4: about it. Color it's everywhere.
Speaker 1: Oh, how about the one last factoid? Why is the
Speaker 1: sky blue?
Speaker 4: Oh it's a good one.
Speaker 1: Sky's not really blue.
Speaker 4: No, it shouldn't really have any color. Yeah, but the
Speaker 4: angle of the sun coming down on the upper atmosphere
Speaker 4: encounters things like water, vapor, and other tiny particles, and
Speaker 4: they tend to scatter blue wavelength light more than the
Speaker 4: other colors.
Speaker 1: Right, that's it.
Speaker 4: So that's just bouncing around at all points, which is
Speaker 4: why the sky is blue. It's say, like noontime. But
Speaker 4: while the sky's blue at noontime over here, it's say
Speaker 4: sunrise or sunset to the east or the west.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And since all that blue light is getting scattered over
Speaker 4: you where it's noontime in the east of the west,
Speaker 4: those reds and yellows and pinks are making it all
Speaker 4: the way there, and the blue is not, which is
Speaker 4: why sunrise and sunset it tends to appear reddish, whereas
Speaker 4: like midday appears blue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is It makes total sense. And when your
Speaker 2: kids ask you why is the sky blue, you can
Speaker 2: tell them you.
Speaker 1: Can tell them like the real reason you can.
Speaker 4: Be like color does not actually exist. Yeah, it's all lie.
Speaker 4: Good luck with that and go to sleep. If you
Speaker 4: want to know more about color, just type that word
Speaker 4: in your favorite search engine or how stuff works dot common.
Speaker 4: It will take you on a wild ride. And since
Speaker 4: I said wild ride, it's time for listener mail. Uh.
Speaker 2: I'm going to call this something I've never heard of before,
Speaker 2: precocious puberty.
Speaker 1: Uh you ever heard of that?
Speaker 4: Yes, we talked about it did it early puberty?
Speaker 1: Okay, did we talk about that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, we said it.
Speaker 2: I guess this is in girls, so maybe that's why
Speaker 2: it got you.
Speaker 1: Surprise me.
Speaker 2: I'm a long time listener, and thanks for helping me
Speaker 2: in my commute every day. Really enjoyed and giggled my
Speaker 2: way through the episode of male puberty. Thanks so much
Speaker 2: for mentioning precocious puberty.
Speaker 1: Well, there you have it.
Speaker 2: I was diagnosed at age two after my mom came
Speaker 2: to wake me before.
Speaker 4: School one day before I had a full beard.
Speaker 2: Now before preschool. This is a lady and she had
Speaker 2: started her period at two years old. Wow, And as
Speaker 2: you can imagine, my mom was terrified. It took a
Speaker 2: long time to get a correct diagnosis since it is
Speaker 2: pretty rare. My treatment started out as daily shots that
Speaker 2: my mom gave me at home that then went to weekly, monthly,
Speaker 2: and annually as a year's progress.
Speaker 1: I also had intermittence days in the hospital for testing.
Speaker 4: Ah, that poor kid.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: Treatment was stopped when I reached twelve years old, essentially
Speaker 2: pressing play and my puberty that had been on pause
Speaker 2: for almost ten years.
Speaker 4: See that's cool treatment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that they figured out how
Speaker 2: to stall puberty.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're like stay stay Okay.
Speaker 1: God.
Speaker 2: I have only hazy memories of this, of course, as
Speaker 2: I was a child, but I do remember that missing
Speaker 2: shots caused quite a bit of pain since my.
Speaker 1: Body was growing out of control.
Speaker 2: Essentially, I've never been able to find out what the
Speaker 2: long term effects might be, but I've had a pretty
Speaker 2: decent health into my adult life and I'm now thirty
Speaker 2: one years old. Awesome, So thanks a lot.
Speaker 1: And that is from Lauren in California.
Speaker 4: Well, thanks a lot, Lauren. Appreciate that we love hearing
Speaker 4: from people with real life experiences of stuff where you
Speaker 4: just talk about that's right.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: If you want to let us know about your real
Speaker 4: life experience, we want to hear it. You can tweet
Speaker 4: to us at s y SK podcast. You can join
Speaker 4: us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know.
Speaker 4: You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at
Speaker 4: HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always, joined us at our
Speaker 4: home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot Com.
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