LIFESTYLE

1 min read

How Much Color Can You See?

July 1, 2015

Bad news, ladies: Your boyfriend isn’t wrong. That dress you swear is “magenta” and he equally insists is “red”? It really is red - to him, at least. Science is on his side. Some evidence suggests that color perception is divided along gender lines, a revelation that may not surprise straight couples who have ever had to go through color swatches together. Where men see “red”, women might see “coral”, “salmon” or “maraschino”. Men really do see color differently. They are more likely to be color blind than women (8 percent of men are colorblind versus 0.5 percent of women*). But colorblindness aside, studies have found that women are slightly better at discriminating among subtle gradations in the middle of the color spectrum. Some scientists attribute this to the hunter-gatherer hypothesis, which suggests that evolution has hard-wired men’s brains to see things one way, and women’s another. While men show “significantly greater sensitivity for fine detail and for rapidly moving stimuli,” which would have served them well in their days as hunters, women have become better adapted to recognizing close-at-hand, static objects - like the “claret” wild berries that are good for dinner, versus those “russet” ones that will poison us. But even if women generally perceive more colors than men, is that true for you? Can you see celadon, cyan and cinnabar, or are your powers of color perception not quite up to par? Take the test, see what you score, and then pit your friends against each other to see who really sees the world most colorfully. Should you score better than your boyfriend, don't argue the next time he calls something “yellow” that is “saffron”, silently celebrate knowing that you see the world in more shades than he does.  

*The most common form of color vision deficiency is recessive and encoded on the X sex chromosome. Because women have two X chromosomes, a woman will only be colorblind if she inherits two of these recessive genes - otherwise the dominant, normal vision gene takes over.

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