Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 4 (Green) - Take 2

[greerwatson]

As someone who likes green, I look at it in comparison with other colours, and I think it gets sadly short-changed. I mean, just consider this:

YELLOW			YELLOW
ORANGE			GREEN
RED			GREEN
BROWN			GREEN

I mean, sure, we have names for the different greens. I'd call the lighter one "lime" and the muted one "olive". But they are still considered to be types of green. Suppose you had T-shirts striped like this:





The first one is striped in orange & yellow, the second in red & yellow, and the third in brown & yellow. However, as far as the others are concerned, if you were given any one of them on its own, you'd probably describe it as being green & yellow.

Of course, we do have names for specific shades of green: ivy green, spruce green, emerald green, spinach green and so on; but these are comparable to "canary yellow", "daffodil yellow", "sunshine yellow", and the like. The point is that lime is as different as orange, and olive as different as brown; but neither is considered to be a totally separate colour.

In fact, it gets more complicated when we look at colours that lie between lime (on the one hand) and orange (on the other hand) and pure yellow. Colours that are almost yellow.





You can run a sequence of interpolating these shades between yellow and either orange or (lime) green:









But if you compare them instead with red and its equivalent shade of green, they look practically yellow! (But not quite.)









When you look at them all together, you can see that they're the missing part of the sequence: you need these additional colours in order to get a proper gradation.





They don't have separate names, though. There really aren't enough names for colours.

Comments

[autobotscoutriella]

Oh, that's an interesting observation! I'd never really thought about that before, but we really don't have a lot of names for shades of green.

[shipperslist]

What an interesting read, thanks!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

And some languages don't even have a word specifically for green- blue and green are timesharing in some languages.

[lightbird]

This is really interesting! Thank you!

💚

[oldtoadwoman]

I love all your color analysis. (Sadly I don't think my laptop monitor is up to displaying the nuances. Through intermittant work-from-home/work-from-work, I recently learned that my computer monitor at work shows colors in some of our spreadsheets very differently… which makes me worry that all the icons I've created may be slightly off.)

Color names are at their most frustrating when the marketing people get involved (so clothing catalogs and home decor). They'll outright mislabel things or give them entirely unhelpful names like (this is an actual example of a paint chip in a hardware store) "Miami Sunset". I honestly don't even remember what color that was; I just remember being annoyed by it. Orange? Yellow? Pink?

Artist's paints are pretty consistently labeled at least. (So you can order a tube of "sap green" without even looking at a sample and be pretty confident of what you'll get) Of course, that still doesn't give you all the colors, because artist's paints are meant to be mixed. Many brands don't even sell many shades of green, since green can be created so easily with yellow and blue. (Look at how many different shades of yellow or blue you can buy of these paints and how few shades of green are for sale: Winsor Newton color chart)

I always find it fascinating that people recognize "pink" as a distinct color from "red" but cannot make a distinction between a pastel pea green and a deep forest green. I think it really just comes down to the words. (I'm honestly dreading the blue-vs-indigo debate that's about to rage.)

[abyss_valkyrie]

Certain shades of green are very beautiful,for me it's emerald.But the thing is,various shades can look good on various materials,like olive green can look amazing on certain clothes, darker greens have a more luxurious look to them. And I can understand the way olive/brown could get mixed up.It's how my mum would say 'wear that brown-ish one' and I'd be like 'I don't have one' and then if she shows it to me,lol,I'd like 'it's green!' This also happens a lot with green/blue transitions for us.XD

[enemytosleep]

It's so interesting to read here and in the comments how people perceive color, and possibly how the available language affects those perceptions. It makes sense, though, that you'd learn to categorize based on the available labels. Very interesting food for thought.

[silveradept]

Thanks for this. I hope I'm seeing them well and correctly, but there seems to be a lot of variance in the spectrum of "green".

I'm beginning to think there's been an arbitrary wavelength that's been determined to be the unmarked version of the color and everything else is some other shade or color that requires a descriptive adjective or another name applied.