How come when one person looks at my eyes they’ll say they’re blue, but when someone else looks, they say green?
Because “green” and “blue” are not well-delineated. There’s room for judgment.
Maybe it’s the love that colours them blue. Or maybe they’re turquoise, which is somewhere between blue and green.
Eye colour is ill-defined. Some people only know two, brown and blue, so every person’s eye colour has to be one or the other. Green is often just a mix of brown and blue or gray, which give a green effect.
Simply put, people aren’t equally color-perceptive. You’ve seen those little pebbly illustrations they use for testing color-blindness, right? I’ve actually taken a color peception test that uses a whole bunch of those to determine how well you can differentiate between colors. It starts with large, obvious color differences to test for red-green or yellow-blue color blindness, and then the color differences start getting smaller and smaller. They test your ability to see differences in hue, saturation, and luminosity.
For example, you might have the number 21 in a slightly greener shade of brown than the background, which some people will be able to see and others won’t. But if you look even more carefully, there’s a bar extending at the top of the 1 to form a 7 in a color even closer to the background. If you have poor color perception, you won’t see any number at all. If you have fairly good color perception, you’ll see 21, and if you’re really perceptive, you’ll see 27.
I’m sure it’s some combination of physical (i.e. something about your rods and cones) and neurological differences. People just don’t quite see the same thing.
Also, the color your eyes appear to be can be influenced by the clothes you’re wearing. Some days your eyes may be looking greener or bluer than others.
Some bluish-greenish hijacks:
1.Did you know that Franz Boas, the father of modern Anthropology, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the perception of the color of seawater (he was actually studying physics at the time)
2.Some cultures do not distinguish between the colors we call blue and green, instead they think of green as a shade of blue.
- Is Opal interested in color perception?
Thanks, that (sort of) helps. Is Opal intrested in what? Who’s Opal, if you don’t mind me asking.
OP: The colour of your eyes can appear different depending on the position of the viewer (Einstein’s Relativity in action) and the way that the light is striking them.
Also, you could be a mutant whose eyes change colour when they are using their mutant powers.
Well, I’m not sure if this has anything to do with what the OP was saying, but colors can be perceived differently by different cultures. For instance, in Korea, people will swear up and down that the sun is “red”. No, this is not a language thing…I have my little kid students color a picture of their favorite weather and those who like sunny days have a big red sun at the top of their page and if I suggest that the sun is yellow, they look at me like I told them that snow is purple.