I rambled a bit in someone else’s thread here…about perception of colour. I did do a quick search on this, but couldn’t find anything (& I did search under color too;))…so males, females…when asked what colour something is which is, for example, dark red, do you say red or do you say burgundy/maroon/dark red/some shade?
If you do just say red, is it laziness, or do you really just see red as red, blue as blue etc?
I’ve noticed that. The male SO doesn’t see shades very well or often.
“It’s white.”
“It’s eggshell.”
“White!”
The exeption is in really bright sunlight. He says UV lights really mess up his color perception, but part of that may be his glasses.
Here’s one female that pretty much sees things in the ROYGBIV spectrum. I know that’s rather unusual for women, as I’ve actually got in arguments with my girlfriends about what color a particular item is (me: “It’s orange!” - them: “it’s burnt sienna!”) and when I bought a shirt last week that looked to me like a lovely light green my best friend had to inform me that it was, in fact, chartreuse. I don’t think I ever even knew what “chartreuse” was before, if you’d asked me I probably would have guessed some shade of pink.
Can’t explain it really. That’s just how I am.
My color perception sucks, big time. I can’t tell shades of blue from shades of light purple, and I also have trouble with dark greens and browns, odd as that sounds. So designation of shades is pretty much out of the question.
If it’s red, it’s red. If it’s blue, it’s blue. I never understood the need to call things maroon or burgundy or lavender, etc. Not only is it not worth the effort to know exactly what colors all those words correspond to, but I can get my point across by saying light red or blue/green, etc. If I were an interior decorator or something I might understand needing to know the difference, but in my book it all falls neatly into ROYGBIV.
I can see the shades, of course, but find very little use in differentiating between say white and eggshell.
It reminds me of that scene on the Simpsons when Lisa was printing up some flyers:
Lisa: “I’ll take 25 on goldenrod, 25 on canary, 25 on saffron, and 25 on yellow”
Kinko’s guy: “Got it. 100 yellow.”
Someone should do a real test…something like showing a single colorchip at the top of a screen and 50 close approximations below, with one exact match amidst them somewhere. See if us male folk can discern the exact match as well as the females, and also whether or not we all tend to line them up in the same order if asked to construct a continuum between patch A and patch B.
My suspicion is that a lot of the perceived differences between the sexes is a difference of vocabulary. The guys I know who work with fine color specifications do so in an environment where they are more likely to discuss them in terms of RGB values ("…yeah, that’s close but try it with about 40 more red and 25 less blue and green").
Well, a friend and I (both male) were arguing about a particular color. “It’s blue!” says I, “It’s green!” says he, “It’s blue!”, “It’s green!”. Since this was on a computer, we fire up a handy color picker.
Turns out we were both right. It was actually a shade of cyan: 128 blue, 128 green.
I’m male, and I have very good color perception. I may not say that a light blue is “Robin’s Egg Blue”, but I will say that something is turquoise, or off-white, or maroon.
Well, I pay a lot of attention to colour shades, and say things are maroon, burgundy, or whatever. However, I don’t know if that’s natural or because that’s what I’ve trained myself to do.
When I make films (either for school or on my own), I pay a lot of attention to colour. There’s a big difference in red and maroon, and how it will make the audience feel. It’s also easier to tell people exactly what I’m looking for if I refer to it like that. Similarly, colour temperature is a big concern. Tungsten bulbs make colours look very different than flourescent bulbs. Using different lighting sources or different gels on lights can give you very different shades of colours.
It’s just natural for me to carry that into things that are outside of film. Also, I really like and do different kinds of art. So maybe it comes from that, too.
My motto:
If it doesn’t come in a 16 pack of Crayola crayons it’s not a color.
Everything else is just shading.
[sub]“What color did you pick for your car?”
“Champagne.”
“Your car is transparent! That’s awesome.”
[/sub]
No, women are just nuts and overcomplicated. (duh?)
Men like to keep it simple, it’s white!
It’s white, you snatchtrollop! 
[/jarbaby]
[sub]No Offense to Arden or the Ladies. Gotta love them ladies.[/sub]
I say the shade. If I know the Pantone number, I’ll give that, too.
I am SOOOO glad I’m not the only one who has a pet peeve about this. Red is red, but there are shades of red which you can classify any way you want. I happen to call it dark red, not burgandy.
The problem I’ve found is that most people know the standard colors but the shades tend to confuse people. Not all people call the shades by their proper name thus confusing the issue further. I had somone try to convince me that fuchsia was a shiny metallic shade of green rather than a bright pink/purple color… and she was using this description on a parking citation!
That’s why it’s important to carry Pantone swatches everywhere you go. 
It can also be a language/cultural difference. My sister told me that in the Russian language, there are two different words for the colors we call dark blue and light blue. Kind of like red and pink - which I think of as being totally different colors, though they have the same relationship as dark and light blue. She said that when she was teaching English in the former Soviet Union, her students couldn’t get over the fact that we DON’T have a separate word for light blue, other than things like sky blue or even turquoise (which still imply “blue”).
Not so! I’m moving up one flight in my building, so I’ll have the same landlord. (His name is Lou and he’s a burly middle-aged plumber). Lou told me he was going to paint the upstairs apartment before I move in. He said he’d paint it same color as downstairs. I said “White?” He said, “Well, actually, it’s Linen. That’s the color I have in my apartment”. Good thing that conversation was on the phone, 'cause it was all I could do not to burst out laughing.
This is an interesting topic for me; my fiance and I had a disagreement awhile ago about a car’s colour. To me, it was obviously purple, and to him, it was obviously blue. I’m not sure if we were describing the same colour with different words, but it really seemed like we were actually seeing two different shades. I like the idea of posting a paint chip and getting some feedback on what we’re all seeing out here.
Vix, I’m glad you posted about the pink/red thing, because for whatever reason I have been thinking about that all the time lately, and wondering if any other languages had different words for the light/dark combos.
I think when I speak, I try to keep it as simple as possible, but I often compare the color to something that is known by the other person, such as “dark green, like the wallpaper” or “gray, but with a little blue in it, like your car” or “a weird orange-red color, like that poncho Mom used to wear in 1974.”
I find it supremely annoying when catalogs give goofy names to colors, like “wild sage” and then it turns out that the wild sage sweater and the wild sage skirt aren’t actually the same color. I read the small print in a J. Crew catalog once, and it said “hues with the same name do not necessarily represent the same color for various garments.” I understand that colors can look slightly different with different fabrics, but these were not even similar colors!
I think men simply name colours on the fly to avoid confusion (à la “wild sage”). For example, there are actually two kinds of “white”: pure white, and “off-white”. The latter is a universal term for a colour that is almost white, but has some kind of tint (“It’s a very vaguely bluish off-white; I hate it.” or “It’s a very vaguely pinkish off-white; I hate it.”). “Cream”, “Eggshell”, and “Linen” are not actual colours, they’re just different kinds of off-white (unless eggshell is a name for pure white) that have been given useless names by interior decorators with far too much time on their hands. There is no “navy”, it’s dark blue. There is no “aqua-marine”, it’s greenish light blue. “Maroon” is actually a (slightly brownish?) dark red.
For any colour that can’t be described as a variant or hybrid of black, white, grey, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, or brown, consult a Pantone guide.
This reminds me of the heated debate that would ensue between my ex and I when he drank lemon-lime Gatorade. We could never decide whether it was yellow or green. It’s these dumb sorts of things that make me miss him. 