I have a tough time distinguishing between hair colours.
Here’s my palette.
blond
dirty blond
brown
black
red
white
grey
Every woman I know has about 5 more shades between each colour, which I can’t see at all. If they recently had their hair dyed, they claim an extra 5 or 6.
If you showed me two different colour chips and asked me to tell you which one was mauve and which one was chartreuse, I’d have to guess. Not because I couldn’t tell them apart, but because I can’t be bothered to learn all the different foo-foo makes for colours.
I don’t know of any physiological reason why men & women would see colors any differently. IMHO, women, in general, just pay more attention to it. I (male) can certainly see the different shades but I have no interest in memorizing all the color names.
Well, the physiological basis I can think of is that men are much more likely than women to be color-blind. It’s an X-chromosome linked disorder, generally passing from maternal grandfather to grandson. My grandfather’s color-blind, but fortunately I’m not (and I have no sibs or first cousins).
Color blindness also comes in degrees. My grandfather, for example, has the most common variety, which is red-green color blindness. He can perceive yellow and, to a lesser extent, blue, but red and green are interchangeable. He knows traffic lights not by red-green but by top-bottom (actually, he lives in Texas so it’s left-right).
Several of the sites I looked at said that about 8% of men have some kind of color deficiency, but most of them don’t entirely lack color perception.
Aha! Now that color blindness has been brought up, I recall reading about tetrachromaticity. Most people have three types of color receptors - red, green, and blue; tetrachromats have four. Because of the way the genetics works, only women have this gift.
So, the answer is, yes, some women really do see different colors than the rest of us.