I live in a neighborhood of 1920s and 30s Craftsman-style houses. My new next door neighbor has painted the trim on his white bungalow purple. Not a deep, almost-black Concord-grape purple, but a Barney the Dinosaur purple. It looks kind of garish, but it’s his house and there are no restrictions or anything.
The city provides two garbage cans to each home. One is bright blue (royal blue, or sometimes called reflex blue) for recycling, and the other one is brown for regular trash. The can is brown like brownies, like dog poop, like an oak board, well-toasted bread. Brown. No wiggle room.
The other day I was outside and he asked me, “What day do we put out the blue can and what day do we put out the GRAY can?”
I said, “Well, I see a blue can and a BROWN can. Blue is on Mondays and brown is on Thursdays.”
He pointed to the brown can and said, “That isn’t GRAY to you?”
And I said, “No, it’s brown.” Then I had to be off to an appointment.
But I started wondering: what color does he think he has painted his trim? IOW what color does he see when he looks at Barney purple? If he sees brown as gray, maybe he sees bright purple as… dark blue, tan, or a subdued mauve? I’ve only just met him and I don’t want to ask point blank.
Or maybe he plans to paint the rest of the house chartreuse or turquoise.
I had backyard neighbors who painted their entire house this color … but brighter, like day-glo fuchsia. Everyone complained about it until they decided to sell the house, and had to paint it another color. They could never understand why people objected to the color.
It’s hard to tell with someone who can’t see brown. Brown can be composed of virtually any colors, depending on the exact color.
I have the most common form of colour-blindness, red-green, which for me means certain shades of said colours are almost indistinguishable and potentially confused with each other.
It doesn’t really manifest itself too often, bright green or vivid red is easily recognisable, it’s only certain muted dim tones, such as a business shirt, or something seen in dim evening light, I might be hard-pressed to know if it was a pink shirt or a pale green shirt. For my own sakes I tend to wear blue a lot, possibly subconsciously for this reason.
I have excellent color vision, and i might enjoy trim in Barney-purple. I don’t do it because i don’t want to upset the neighbors. And, hmm, i should go more that strip of crab grass…
I’m somewhat insensitive to blue. Rarely a problem, but I have been thrown by blue on blue signs that used to be used at local parks, and I’ll often describe colors as green that others see as blue. I can only tell navy from black in very bright sunlight. Flourescent lights that people used to complain about having a blue tint looked as good as white light to me.
If he sees brown as grey I suspect it’s deuteranopia, not deuteranomaly. I have the latter and do not see brown as grey, and although I like purple would probably not use the Barney shade for trim due to seeing it well enough to understand why others would find it obnoxious.
Of course, it’s impossible to actually determine if the gentleman mentioned in the OP has non-standard vision over the internet.
If you have a smartphone, there are apps that can simulate the different types of colorblindness. They use the camera and adjust the colors on the screen.
You could try to see if any of them show the brown bin as grey, then look at the barney trim.
My sense of where teal falls on the green-blue spectrum is obviously different to a lot of people’s, including most of my family’s. It’s my favourite shade and I’m often surprised to be told I’m wearing green when I’m absolutely convinced I’m wearing blue.
Some of this might be mere mental classification on our part - I may say that teal falls on the “green” side of the spectrum, somebody else might think it falls on the “blue” side of the spectrum.
According to the second graphic at this site, both deuteranopia and protonopia (options 2 and 3 on the slide) cause brown to appear as a dark gray, and bright purple as shades of blue.
Wins the thread!! Your prize will be delivered by UPS. A responsible adult must be home to sign for it.
No kidding–this is very informative. I’ll bet he thinks he was painting his trim some shade of blue, which would look very nice in our little cozy neighborhood.
There are smartphone apps that will show you augmented reality split screen what things look like if you have any of several forms of colorblindness.
They are pretty cool.
I used one with a friend who is red-green colorblind, and he confirmed that he couldn’t tell a difference between the straight video feed and the colorblind-filtered one.
The thing that impressed me was that, although to me everything looked like various shades of blue and yellow, he could still pick out different things as red and green. So, he’s using some more subtle visual cues (possibly non-chromal ones) to figure out red/green while I am totally clueless when deprived of the really obvious color channel I’ve been used to all my life.
︎:black_medium_square:︎:black_medium_square:︎:black_medium_square:︎ is the color of Barney the Dinosaur.
