Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry and it's Stuff you should Know color and technicolor. Yeah, which is really something. It's tea technical or yeah. Yeah, imagine what it was like back then. Oh, Man debut just melting people's eyes out. Bad. Probably good, You're like, wow, how are you doing? I'm great. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, how are you going? I'm good. I'm tired, but I'm good. I gotta particularly to study. Oh yeah, you get up early to make the cheese? What? Oh? You know, it's just a saying kind of make Wait wait, who's saying, yeah, make the cheese, make the sausage, make the doughnuts, of her, make the donuts. You never make the sausage. You don't want to see how the sausage just made. Just pick anything. Make the cheese. I don't think so. The cheese milk a cow. People get up early for that, so I guess there's that association. Have you ever milk to cow? No? Have you know? I was talking to Emily about that the other day because uh. We went horse riding, and I'd never ridden a horse before. Oh yeah, it's pretty neat. Huh, it's my new favorite thing. Yeah, it was amazing, how awesome it was. Did you jump over anything on the horse? No? But we like, you know, trotted up a hill. Did you shoot a bow and arrow? No? Almost fell off though. And yeah when he trotted up the hill, I got like kind of loosened saddle, as they say. I was like, whoa, Okay, well that's exactly what you should have said, is whoa. Well no, he was going uphill, so I had to just keep on trucking. Really yeah, I didn't want to stop him. Good for you, man, he was carrying a load. I felt bad for the horse. I'm sure he was fine, Yeah he was all right. Yeah. What was his name? Um? Oh? Man? Now I'm kicking myself like a horse because I called this horse by his name the whole day and now I can't remember Calvin. I thought we'd bonded. I guess I was just pretending. That's cool. The horse probably can't remember your name either. And he took a big dump they do that, right, and then just stopped and I was like, what are you stopping for and I was like, oh, oh, you're lucky even stop sometimes they just walk and do that. Really, all of the ones on our little ride stopped to poop, which I thought was maybe I'm confusing them with another animal humans just walking poop at the same time. Anyway, it was my favorite new thing. I loved it. That's cool, man, I felt buried at home. What color was the horse? One of the spotted ones, which I love, man. I was hoping you're gonna say, like blue or red or something easy. You smashed the table. Let's go with blue. Okay, blue, It was a blue horse, So allow me to explain why your horse appeared blue. Okay, As Newton figured out, that horse is not inherently blue. There's nothing inherently blue about that horse. It's all in our perception because color technically doesn't exist. It exists in our minds. Well, yeah, the perception of color does exactly. But like an apple isn't just there's nothing in the apple that's red, exactly chucking. There's nothing in your horse that made it blue. What happens is that color is basically our perception of a specific wavelength of visible light that's right invisible light is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes everything from microwaves to radio waves to gamma raise to um ocean waves. Not quite, but visible light is part of that wave pools. No, no, no, just those things that I said, Ok, so um along that spectrum is this very narrow little slice that's visible light and invisible light, which we see as like white light, sunlight. Yeah, it is the presence of the rainbow, which are called the spectral colors. On one end, you have the short wavelength, which is blue. On the other end, you have the h long wavelengths, which is red technically violet. On the the other side, well, red has a bunch of different names. When you start reading in the color, well, no blue on the blue side, it's like starts at violet. But we don't perceive it very well. Oh well, I'm talking about what humans can see. Yeah, and then everything else is in between, right, and what's in what's really in the middle, like yellow maybe it seems like yellows kind of in the middle. Yeah, we just think you tell me, well, on the other end, beyond violet, you've got ultra violet, and beyond red you've got infrared. Yeah, these are things we can't see. No, we can't. Some animals can, remember they think monarch butterflies are able to migrate all the way to Mexic co Um using ultra violet detecting ultra violet. I remember that. Yeah, man, that was a good episode. Amazing. So this, this band of light, this visible spectrum, contains the spectral colors which we perceive, right. And for a very long time, everybody just thought, well, that apple's red, but that horse is blue. That's just how it's born. There's nothing that can be done about it. And then, like we said, along came Newton, and Newton said, no, something weird is going on here. Like you said, color doesn't really exist. It's in the eye of the beholder, almost literally, right, um. And the reason why an apple seems red or your horse seems blue are because of natural chemicals found in say the skin of the apple or the hide of the horse, that are called pigments. So in an apple, specifically, it's anthro cyanins that make it red. In in the case of a carrot, it's carotenoids. In the case of grass, it's chlorophyll. And these pigments had the cape ability of absorbing some wavelengths of light and reflecting others back. And the wavelength that it reflects back are the colors that we perceive. That's right, And that's if it's an object that is opaque. Well, yeah, that's a big one right there. Apples are pretty opaque. Yeah, I would say, so that's your Superman maybe yeah, he it's invisible see through apple. Oh yeah he can, Candy, I get your joke now. So yeah, with an opaque object where light um doesn't pass all the way through, some lights reflected back. So in the case of anthra cyanons, this pigment absorbs all the other wavelengths of light except red, and it reflects red back, and so red is reflected back. So what you see when you look at this apple with all the red light reflecting back at you is a red apple. That's how we perceive color in the world around us naturally. And if it's transparent, uh, it's not reflecting that light but transmitting it. So it depends on the color of light that's passing through it instead of reflecting back to you. And again it's that chemical makeup. It's it operates in sort of the same way. Um. It's just not like in an apple skin. Let's say, yeah, exactly. But it all comes to do It comes down to basically pigments or whatever natural chemical or mineral that either absorbs or reflects certain wavelengths of light. That's right. So here's the thing, though, Chuck, Like that can happen all day long, and as long as there's not a human or a monkey, or a dolphin or a dog, because dogs are not color blind, that's right. They see different colors than we do, but they're not color blind. I always wonder how they do this tests ah, animals. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I'm sure it's pretty easy to find out, but I just didn't have time to look into it. I'm with you. Yeah, this is like in massive black hole of information. Like you could just keep going and going and going with colors such a huge expansive topic that we could just do nothing but color episodes for the next several months if we wanted to do do. You want to kill me, I may not make it through today's. So you're doing great. This is fine. This is great, Chuck. It is a very like big subject, Yes it is, man, We're just we're providing a brief overview of it. That's right. So um, Like I was saying, things can reflect color all the time, but as long as there's not something there to perceive it, is there any Is there really any color there? Well that's a philosophical question, but there's an answer to it, and the answer is no. If the tree falls in the woods and no one's around to here, it doesn't make annoyance. No. Actually, my my opinion on that one is yes, okay, but with color, Um, yeah, it doesn't exist without being perceived. I think it sound to me is different things. It's a bit of the brain melter. But I see what you're saying. Okay. So um. That leads you to the question of how do we see color? And that wasn't figured out until the eighteenth century, and it wasn't proven, I think, until the sixties. And there were a pair of guys who were a dynamic duo if I've ever heard of one before, And what were their names? Well, Thomas Young he was I thought he was kind of the main guy. Had never heard of the other guy, Herman von Helmholtz. Yeah, Thomas Young. Um. What I read was that he was the first to propose the trichromatic theory basically that we see everything through red, green, and blue channels because that's how our eyes pick up on color. Yeah, because we have specialized cells in our eyes called cones, right, and I think we have something like, um, a hundred million or some ridiculous amount of rods. And rods are the things that we see in like fine detail, black and white typically, right, cones are color perceiving sy and each cell is specialized. You either attuned to wavelengths that red, green, or blue. Yeah, you have way more rods than cones, about a hundred and twenty million rods in each eye and only only about six million cones in each eye. And those cones are concentrated mostly in the front of your retina in the middle, right, which is why you don't see color periphetally quite as well, that's right. So, um, these cells are attuned to different wavelengths, right, The long wavelengths are red, medium is green, and short is blue. Like you said medium was yellow. No, that's in the middle, okay, right, so medium is not in the middle, well as far as our RGB goes, okay, Yeah, And so with these cells, chuck, if you're looking at your blue horse. What was his name, Calvin the Blue Horse. So if you're looking at Calvin the Blue Horse, you're getting a lot of information on from short wavelength light, not so much at the longer medium wavelengths, right, And so there's probably a little bit it's not a true blue horse, right, which would mean that it was a totally saturated blue, which is only that blue wavelength, true blue wavelength. Coming to your eyes, there's probably a little bit of green, a little bit of red. And so all the cones in your eyes are getting all of this information at once, and they're reporting to your brain via electrical impulses about the quality of the wavelengths of light that they're getting. And so your brain takes it and basically becomes a color mixer and creates the color blue that you're seeing. Calvin ass that's how we detect color. And from the R and the G and the B you can put together. Supposedly, the Commission on Illumination, a European Commission on illumination back in one determined that humans can see something like two point three eight million colors. Oh, it's such a hundred million, now, is it? Because I've seen all over the place in this findings are the ones that people say, this has the best science behind it. Yeah, now I'm sorry. Ten million Okay. The other thing about the c I E Is that people say, well, this was only under certain types of illumination. I think three different types of illumination, so it is entirely possible if you change the intensity or whatever, you're going to have brand new colors. So ten millions reasonable. That's a lot of colors that we can see all from the red, the green, and the blue cones coming together and your brain adjusting them and seeing, oh, well that's um burnt sienna. Did you Yeah, this sort of the go to joke color, right, it is a pretty jokey color. It's a good one. Uh yeah, it's pretty amazing. Ten million colors, or let's say it's two million, if you're going by you know, naming convention. Shall we talk about some of the characteristics of color. Yeah, but let's take a break first. It is getting heavy, all right, so if you um actually you can do this on your modern television as well. But it seemed like most TVs now kind of come fairly set up. But in the old days, when you have those little wheels to try and get that color right. It was. You know, you might have noticed things that said hugh and intensity or value or tone and all that stuff. Those are all color characteristics, and hugh specifically is um. I mean, that's basically what the color is. It's not the lightness of the darkness. It's you know, it's the greenness or the redness or the blueness that's the hue. Yeah, it's it's what you can interchange that word with color. Yeah, exactly. UM. I like how they refer to as the identity of a color sounds kind of personal. Uh. The intensity is how pure it is so um. Like we said, most colors are mixes, you know, they bleed one way or the other on the wavelength. But in its purest form a single wavelength um, which is really rare, that would be the purity or the intensity of the color. Um. You're not gonna see that very often though. No, And I was wondering, like, that's pretty cool. There's some physics labs somewhere that can produce pure saturated green, like unadulterated green or unadulterated blue. There is there has to be. Yeah, probably that is gotta be really something to see to know you're looking at green, like think but green, I would like to see that sometime. Yeah, and I have, UM, I'm not color blind, but I have a more difficult time picking out other cues in a color, whereas Emily is really good, like when picking out paint colors, like that gray has this and this and this and it, and I'm like, really like I see gray. Well, supposedly a lot of people have a color deficiency. I might have a slight color deficiency, and a lot of people don't realize that. Well, yeah, so a lot of people don't realize that they think that this is this color just looks like this and thinks everybody sees it that way and this in the case, and then it comes from a conversation where they're like, well, wait a minute, what do you mean you see a distinction between those? Well, but yeah, but in my case, it's hues. It's not like I see a completely different color or you know, black or everything just looks gray. I did UM a brain stuff on color blindness. It is pretty interesting. Yeah. I went to UM research that one time for a show, and it would just like bent in my mind so much. I'd quietly file it away, so I'm sure you'll pick it next week. Color blindness, Yeah, Um. Value is the lightness or darkness of a color, and that's basically has to do with light. Um, the energy of the light that makes it up. Yeah, and the value is um, so he was. There's really just kind of a finite, very finite number of colors of hues, right. Um. And you think of like primary colors, which we'll talk about soon. Um. But when you adjust something, when you adjust them the value of it, that just creates a whole new range of colors. So if you add a little black to a color, what you're doing is shading it. Yeah. If you add white, you are creating a tint. And then if you add black and white gray, you're toning it. Yeah. Right, And I think people interchange those words without understanding what they mean. Yeah, but they are definite distinct things, and um that we should probably say. There's a lot of really neat sights on the internet. Pantone is a really good one, um, where you can go look at color wheels and things like that and see the distinction between these things and be like, oh, you mean pastels. That's another word for a tone. Yeah, And it's a lot of people get really get into it because it's the basis of printing and art and photography, and like every every sort of art form, well not every art form, but many art forms boil down to color. So if you go to art school, you're gonna study color pretty deeply. Yeah, you know, and one of the things you're gonna study is color theory. And color theory is based on the idea that certain colors can contrast one another, certain colors complement one another, certain colors should never be used together. And not that it's just you know, um, your instructor says saying these colors don't go together. It's not just search his opinion. These are objective facts as far as color theory goes, and it's all based on um. These the idea that all colors fall into one of two categories. You have additive colors and subtractive colors. Yeah, and there's a couple of I mean, there's two distinct applications for both of these. If you're talking about a computer screen or or a television, that's that's using light, so it's additive. Um. If you're talking about paint or photography, that's subtractive, right, So you can think of it this way. With additive colors, you're starting with black and you're adding light to it, and ultimately, when you add all these additive colors together, you're going to have white. With subtractive colors, you start with white, and when you add all these colors together, you're ultimately going to have black. And they subtract by absorbing one another's colors. Yeah, that's another color mind bender two because with subtract active color, you're still adding colors, but it's not additive, right to wrap your head around that. Yeah, but there's there's subtracting wavelengths by combining colors and absorbing them, right, Yeah, it takes a hue out. So a really good example of subtractive colors is if you take um cyane. Cyan absorbs orange red, right, So if you take cyane and you mix it with yellow, you produce green. And the reason that cyane and yellow produced green, it's because the cyane absorbs the red light and the yellow light. The yellow absorbs blue violet, and so the only color that's not subtracted or absorbed is green. So green is produced from these other pigments absorbing all the other wavelengths, and with an additive coloring, additive pigments, it's it's quite the opposite. You have um light combining to form new colors. Rather than absorbing, you're adding to it. Yeah, and like the apple is an example, like we said earlier, of a subtractive color system um and again, like a TV screen would be additive. I think we I think we got that. Yeah, I mean it is mine bending a little bit. Some of the stuff, you know, I have to read like ten times and then it sinks in. But the the reason that all colors can be turned into either additive primaries or subtractive primaries is that these are the six colors. Of these they're the six spectral colors. They're the rainbow colors, right, So additive primaries are what red, green, and blue the correct Yeah, and then the subtractive colors are cyan yellow and um magenta ye I was gonna say magenta. They're almost like bizarro colors. They're the bizarro world. Primary colors. When you think of primary colors, you think of like the the what red, yellow, and blue, because ye, red, yellow, and blue were the traditional primaries and they still are. But um when it comes to like painting and printing. They've been replaced with cyan, magenta, yellow and black. K. Yeah, when you go to your clubhouse printer, Yeah, that's what you're gonna be seeing C M K. Or you can select r G B as well, red, green and blue. So Crosby stills Nash and Young, right or Crosby Stills in Nash. Yeah. Okay, that's the difference. That's a good rule of thumb. Man. All right, So we mentioned primary colors just a second ago, and then we have our secondary colors, green, orange, and purple hues would you get from mixing the primary colors, and then you have something called tertiary colors, which is this furthering the color hues by mixing primary colors with secondary colors. Right, So the six tertiary colors and the two sets of primary colors or the six secondary colors, I think in the two sets of primary colors form the color wheelers twelve colors in the color wheel, and tertiary colors are the ones that you'll hear like blue, green or red violet. Yeah, it's like literally named the two colors, and color naming is another rabbit hole that you can go down. There's a site. Um man, I wish I'd written it down, but it's if you type in like who names colors or color naming or something like that in Google, like one of the one of the first page entries is the site that you go through and um, it shows you different colors and you write what you would name that color? Interesting, butter yellow or something like that, right, and the whole well that was the as far as I got. Mike Well, I would call it butter yellow. Hungry had other things to do. But um, you can go through and just I think it's like two enter twenty different shades that they show you, colors that they show you, and the the the whole purpose of all this is to find some sort of commonality to create universal A universal naming convention for colors makes um because you know, there is a lot of distinction among languages for naming colors. But at least one study that I found decided that all colors universally for societies that do recognize individual colors, rather than these are just warm colors and these are cool colors, which is universal. Um. The more primary the color, the shorter and easier to remember the name of it. Is like across culture, so not all cultures will call it blue. But what a culture is going to have like another like short monosyllabic name for that color, for the same thing that we would call blue. That's pretty interesting just because it's easier to understand. It's just it's basic, like colors appear to be basic universally. All right, I think we should take another break and maybe come back and talk a little bit about how colors can complement each other and live in harmony and what that all means to us. Okay, all right, we're back were Uh So we talked about the different uh primary color, secondary, and tertiary. And there's also something called complementary colors, which are basically contrasting colors that make a neutral color when put together, and they are really far apart and hugh as far apart as they can be. And there if you look at the color wheel there on the complete opposite side from one another, right um. And when you place them next to each other, then their hue is like, uh, I guess it's just more robust looking. Yeah, because they complement one another, right um. Yeah, complimentary doesn't necessarily mean like, oh, they look great together. Under all circumstances. So, um, some complementary colors like red and green, if you play them next to each other in the same intensity and the same size, it's another one. You are going to have what's called an eyesore. I have a shirt like that. It's just too much equal amounts of bright red and bright green. Trying to think of that shirt. It's just a Christmas shirt? Is it retired? Well, it's it's a holiday shirt. Um. But the whole point of having colors and using colors together isn't just like, well, these two are opposite the color wheel, so I'm gonna use them in equal amounts and equal intensity and everything will be right. You have to achieve what's called color harmony. Um. And in doing that, you want to choose different um, different shades or different tones or different tints, and also different amounts at once. So like you're going to use a bunch of red and a little bit of green as an accent. That would be much more harmonious than equal amounts of intense red and green next to each other. Yeah, and again this is um. When we say it's not a matter of taste, that's like picking something out as a matter of taste. But again, these are like scientific rules. You can't just throw two colors together and say that looks great or that they're harmonious. Um. I mean, I guess you could, but you'd be wrong. You would surge would be like, you're wrong. This is objective stuff. And then with complimentary colors. Getting back to that, there's this really cool thing that they bring up called retinal fatigue. So you can do a little experiment at home that's kind of blows your mind, but it really illustrates how color works pretty well. If you look at a bright red spot for about a minute, um, your retinas are going to soak in all that red, all those cones are And then when you go immediately and look at a white surface, uh, you're gonna see green briefly, not forever, right, And the reason why is because your red cells have just been basically overstimulated and they're gonna respond weekly to the information that they're getting from that white, right, and your blue and green cells are gonna be functioning just fine, so they're gonna easily overwhelm your red cells. And so what you'll see is this ghost image of like a cyan square. Yeah, which is why, uh, and the reason why it is because red is the complement of green will always be that opposite. It doesn't just like randomly pick out a color. I know, And if you start adding all this stuff together that there are objectively complementary colors that you see when you see too much of the opposite one, doesn't it all seem to fit so cleanly together that you're almost like, what is going on here? Like? What is color? Why do we see color? Yeah, it's a really good question, and evolutionary biologists have not been able to explain it fully. Yeah, I guess I really never thought about that because there's well, I mean, there's probably some evolutionary benefit, right, like green things are generally good to eat. Yeah, but green is also the the kind of a universal color for disgust or sickness or illness, like you're green because you're green around the gills or something like that. Green is often like the color of rot. But it's true, I mean, it's both. So how how do we evolve to understand the nuanced And I mean clearly, if we didn't evolve to see in color so that we could do this, we have as a byproduct of it. But we can very easily tick off whether something is healthy for us dangerous. Um. We we get a lot of information about an object in our environments, quality and desirability based on its color. It's almost like a shorthand that our brains pick up. Yeah, And part of that is because we're conditioned after years of using green for go and green for safe passage, and like red or orange for hazard signs and stop signs. So part of that's conditioning. But as far as like going back many many years before we made stop signs, I have no idea. Yeah, you know, it really makes you wonder. And even like the idea that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, that's a fairly recent development. Prior to I think the early twentieth century, it was the opposite. Did we ever do that as a show or didn't? It was too short? I think we did, like a video one or something. Didn't we maybe I seem to remember that, But it was the opposite until like the the interesting Yeah, yeah, that's interesting totally. Is that's why you rock your pink shirts? Well, yeah, right, that's exactly why that action. So getting back to harm harmonious colors, uh, if they are side but and This is if you're like picking out colors in your house or whatever. If you're not very good at it, there are a few hard and fast rules. Um, colors that are and get your little color wheel out is really handy. If they're side by side, Uh, they're gonna harmonize well. Um. And like we mentioned, colors directly across from one another. Complimentary ones also go well in the right proportions because, like you said, the size of it makes a big difference. They point out in the article. I don't if you've ever seen someone who's like painted their room red, like in college, you know, some stupid room hate would do that. It's an assault on your senses because you're not used to seeing that much red. But maybe an accent wall in a shade of red matched with a complimentary color, you would want it red and green room though it gets green as complimented or red. No, but you could conceivably say, um, use the complementary color for like the trim or something like that. Yeah, exactly, Um. And then tents and shades and tones of the same color are always okay together. It's never gonna clash. But um, you're just gonna have to mess around with like how much of one compared to the other and what places your eye Yes, no, and so again Surge is is saying like, no, there's objective truth as to complementary colors and harmonious colors, but there is also personal preference. And this is kind of like the thorn in the side of the whole idea of color psychology that people use colors to manipulate other people into, like buying a product or whatever. Study after study keeps finding that color preferencing color symbolism is extremely personal. It's based on past experience, on your upbringing, on your culture. Like for example, here in the West we wear black from mourning. Yeah, well, in the East, white is the color from mourning. So there's a lot of culturally bound ideas about color too, which keeps it from being like universally symbolic or whatever. But that being said, there are some that just from being exposed to it time and time again, like a red stoplight that you come to um identify symbolically with other stuff. Yeah, and colors will also affect everyone differently mood wise, but there are some generalities there too. Um Like blue is generally a soothing color that will calm you down. Um too much though could actually have the opposite effect, like too much blue on some people, or can really depress you. What blue can I wonder if that's why they say you're blue? Yeah? Yeah, I mean think about we describe our world like that, green with envy. Blue means you're down in the dumps. Red means are angry? Yeah, red faced or red neck? Wait, that's different. It's a little different. Warm colors, reds and yellows. Um can also lift the spirits if you're less excitable. Um. And they say that most people want to just strike a balance though, between the cool and the warm, right, And that's when it comes to like personal preference. Yeah, but the idea behind this is that a lot of people don't realize this is going on, that they're being affected by color, even though they are. That it's on a very unconscious level. Yeah. And it also depends a lot on light, like how much light a room has coming into it, because you're gonna because sunlight is different than artificial light, your shirt's gonna look at different color outside in the sun as it might. Uh. And I remember when we did the TV show, there was a lot of um with colors and stuff. You know, things would look different outside than they would under studio lights. Right. Well, what's neat though, is we humans have developed this trick called color constancy, where, um, if you look at something, even if it's in the shadow or in the sunlight, it should conceivably look like different colored things because of the illumination. But to us, we're still like, no, that's still green, just because there's you know, shadow blocking it now, I still see it as green. It doesn't make any sense, and it's kind of perplexed. Um. I guess, uh biologists for a while trying to figure out what this is, or neurologists, and they figured out that yes, it is in the brain. Um. And there was this one guy who had some sort of brain damage, I think from an electric shock, and he also went for all intensive purposes blind but he could still see color, but he didn't have color constancy. So they figured out that this guy was detecting wavelengths of light color even though he couldn't see anything. He could see colors still, but color constancy wasn't there. So they figured out, well, that means that it's a trick of the brain. Very neat, it's very cool um. They also ing up in the in the House of Works article something. I think it's pretty interesting how certain because of conditioning, certain colors can just appear to be wrong. Like if you were to pull up and see a green stop sign, it would freak you out. Or the example the Houston here is if you cracked an egg and there was a green egg yolk um, that would be really freaky too, because you're just so used to that yellow. You know, you'd think, well, this is disease or something, yeah, or dr seust you know, uh what else you got? Did you look at that thing on pigment I did. There's some wacky ways people have made pigments, yeah, I mean pigment um. As far as making paint in things. Uh, Now, they're synthetic, synthetic, you know, like they're synthesizing laboratories, which makes sense. But throughout all of history, up until they started doing that, they were actual, uh, real things in the ground and on the earth that they would grind up into powder. Um. In the case of blue, there was a semi precious stone called, or there still is called Lepis Lazuli that was found all over the place in Afghanistan. And that's how they made blue. Um Azure or azure right, is a blue mineral of copper. So all of them, uh, most of them have a few different ways they can make it. Um red. I think we've talked about cinnabar before. The mineral is where you get vermilion red and carmine. Carmine is bright red and that comes from aluminum salt of carminic acid. So it's just crazy that they found all these things in the world to make. And I know blue is the toughest one because you don't see blue very much in nature. Um. I think blue is the one you will see least in the primary colors as far as nature goes, like some insects, but like there's no blue food. Um, yeah, that's true. Blue horses, No, Well, what about mine? My favorite was India Yellow, where they would feed cows nothing but mango leaves and then collect their urine and then boil it down, then filter out the concentrated muck and then make balls out of it. And there was the basis of your pigment. It's pretty cool stuff. So those are just a few. If you really get into pigments, and you can like go crazy trying to figure out where they all came from. Definitely, And um, I mean again, this is like really just the surface of color. There's so much to it, and um, I strongly advise you to go out and learn more about it. Color it's everywhere. How about the one last factoid? Why is the sky blue? Oh, it's a good one. Guy's not really blue. No, it shouldn't really have any color. But the angle of the sun coming down on the upper atmosphere um encounters things like water, vapor, and other tiny particles, and they tend to scatter blue wavelength light more than the other colors, right, so that it's just bouncing around at all points, which is why the sky is blue. It's say, like noontime. But while the sky is blue at noontime over here, it's say sunrise or sunset to the east or the west. And since all that blue light is getting scattered over you where it's noontime in the in the east of the west, those reds and yellows and pinks are making it all the way there and the blue is not, which is why sunrise and sunset it tends to appear reddish, whereas like mid day appears blue yeah, which is it makes total sense. And when your kids ask you why is the sky blue? You can tell him. You can tell them like the real reason you can be like color does not actually exist. It's all lie. Good luck with that, go to sleep. If you want to know more about color, just type that word in your favorite search engine or how stuff works. That common and will take you on a wild ride. And since I said wild ride, it's time for listener mail. Uh. I'm to call this something I've never heard of before. Precocious puberty. Uh you ever heard of that? Yeah, we talked about it, did we early puberty? Okay, did we talk about that? I guess this is in girls, So maybe that's why got you surprised me. I'm a long time listener, and thanks for helping me in my commute every day. Really enjoyed and giggled my way through the episode of male puberty. Um, thanks so much for mentioning precocious puberty. Well, there you have it. I was diagnosed at age two after my mom came to wake me before school one day. Now before preschool. This is a lady. Uh, And she had started her period at two years old, and as you can imagine, my mom was terrified. It took a long time to get a correct diagnosis since it is pretty rare. My treatment started out as daily shots that my mom gave me at home UM that then went to weekly, monthly, and annually as a year's progressed. I also had intermittent stays in the hospital for testing. Poor kid. I know. Treatment was stopped when I reached twelve years old, essentially pressing play of my puberty that have been on pause for almost in years. Let's let's see that's cool treatment. Yeah, I mean it's amazing that they figured out how to stall puberty. Yeah, they're like, stay stay, Okay. I have only hazy memories of this, of course, as I was a child, but I do remember that missing UM shots caused quite a bit of pain since my body was growing out of control. Essentially never been able to find out what the long term effects might be. But I've had a pretty decent health into my adult life and I'm now thirty one years old. Awesome, So thanks a lot. And that is from Lauren in California. Well, thanks a lot. Lauren. 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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry and it's Stuff you should Know color and technicolor. Yeah, which is really something. It's tea technical or yeah. Yeah, imagine what it was like back then. Oh, Man debut just melting people's eyes out. Bad. Probably good, You're like, wow, how are you doing? I'm great. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, how are you going? I'm good. I'm tired, but I'm good. I gotta particularly to study. Oh yeah, you get up early to make the cheese? What? Oh? You know, it's just a saying kind of make Wait wait, who's saying, yeah, make the cheese, make the sausage, make the doughnuts, of her, make the donuts. You never make the sausage. You don't want to see how the sausage just made. Just pick anything. Make the cheese. I don't think so. The cheese milk a cow. People get up early for that, so I guess there's that association. Have you ever milk to cow? No? Have you know? I was talking to Emily about that the other day because uh. We went horse riding, and I'd never ridden a horse before. Oh yeah, it's pretty neat. Huh, it's my new favorite thing. Yeah, it was amazing, how awesome it was. Did you jump over anything on the horse? No? But we like, you know, trotted up a hill. Did you shoot a bow and arrow? No? Almost fell off though. And yeah when he trotted up the hill, I got like kind of loosened saddle, as they say. I was like, whoa, Okay, well that's exactly what you should have said, is whoa. Well no, he was going uphill, so I had to just keep on trucking. Really yeah, I didn't want to stop him. Good for you, man, he was carrying a load. I felt bad for the horse. I'm sure he was fine, Yeah he was all right. Yeah. What was his name? Um? Oh? Man? Now I'm kicking myself like a horse because I called this horse by his name the whole day and now I can't remember Calvin. I thought we'd bonded. I guess I was just pretending. That's cool. The horse probably can't remember your name either. And he took a big dump they do that, right, and then just stopped and I was like, what are you stopping for and I was like, oh, oh, you're lucky even stop sometimes they just walk and do that. Really, all of the ones on our little ride stopped to poop, which I thought was maybe I'm confusing them with another animal humans just walking poop at the same time. Anyway, it was my favorite new thing. I loved it. That's cool, man, I felt buried at home. What color was the horse? One of the spotted ones, which I love, man. I was hoping you're gonna say, like blue or red or something easy. You smashed the table. Let's go with blue. Okay, blue, It was a blue horse, So allow me to explain why your horse appeared blue. Okay, As Newton figured out, that horse is not inherently blue. There's nothing inherently blue about that horse. It's all in our perception because color technically doesn't exist. It exists in our minds. Well, yeah, the perception of color does exactly. But like an apple isn't just there's nothing in the apple that's red, exactly chucking. There's nothing in your horse that made it blue. What happens is that color is basically our perception of a specific wavelength of visible light that's right invisible light is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes everything from microwaves to radio waves to gamma raise to um ocean waves. Not quite, but visible light is part of that wave pools. No, no, no, just those things that I said, Ok, so um along that spectrum is this very narrow little slice that's visible light and invisible light, which we see as like white light, sunlight. Yeah, it is the presence of the rainbow, which are called the spectral colors. On one end, you have the short wavelength, which is blue. On the other end, you have the h long wavelengths, which is red technically violet. On the the other side, well, red has a bunch of different names. When you start reading in the color, well, no blue on the blue side, it's like starts at violet. But we don't perceive it very well. Oh well, I'm talking about what humans can see. Yeah, and then everything else is in between, right, and what's in what's really in the middle, like yellow maybe it seems like yellows kind of in the middle. Yeah, we just think you tell me, well, on the other end, beyond violet, you've got ultra violet, and beyond red you've got infrared. Yeah, these are things we can't see. No, we can't. Some animals can, remember they think monarch butterflies are able to migrate all the way to Mexic co Um using ultra violet detecting ultra violet. I remember that. Yeah, man, that was a good episode. Amazing. So this, this band of light, this visible spectrum, contains the spectral colors which we perceive, right. And for a very long time, everybody just thought, well, that apple's red, but that horse is blue. That's just how it's born. There's nothing that can be done about it. And then, like we said, along came Newton, and Newton said, no, something weird is going on here. Like you said, color doesn't really exist. It's in the eye of the beholder, almost literally, right, um. And the reason why an apple seems red or your horse seems blue are because of natural chemicals found in say the skin of the apple or the hide of the horse, that are called pigments. So in an apple, specifically, it's anthro cyanins that make it red. In in the case of a carrot, it's carotenoids. In the case of grass, it's chlorophyll. And these pigments had the cape ability of absorbing some wavelengths of light and reflecting others back. And the wavelength that it reflects back are the colors that we perceive. That's right, And that's if it's an object that is opaque. Well, yeah, that's a big one right there. Apples are pretty opaque. Yeah, I would say, so that's your Superman maybe yeah, he it's invisible see through apple. Oh yeah he can, Candy, I get your joke now. So yeah, with an opaque object where light um doesn't pass all the way through, some lights reflected back. So in the case of anthra cyanons, this pigment absorbs all the other wavelengths of light except red, and it reflects red back, and so red is reflected back. So what you see when you look at this apple with all the red light reflecting back at you is a red apple. That's how we perceive color in the world around us naturally. And if it's transparent, uh, it's not reflecting that light but transmitting it. So it depends on the color of light that's passing through it instead of reflecting back to you. And again it's that chemical makeup. It's it operates in sort of the same way. Um. It's just not like in an apple skin. Let's say, yeah, exactly. But it all comes to do It comes down to basically pigments or whatever natural chemical or mineral that either absorbs or reflects certain wavelengths of light. That's right. So here's the thing, though, Chuck, Like that can happen all day long, and as long as there's not a human or a monkey, or a dolphin or a dog, because dogs are not color blind, that's right. They see different colors than we do, but they're not color blind. I always wonder how they do this tests ah, animals. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I'm sure it's pretty easy to find out, but I just didn't have time to look into it. I'm with you. Yeah, this is like in massive black hole of information. Like you could just keep going and going and going with colors such a huge expansive topic that we could just do nothing but color episodes for the next several months if we wanted to do do. You want to kill me, I may not make it through today's. So you're doing great. This is fine. This is great, Chuck. It is a very like big subject, Yes it is, man, We're just we're providing a brief overview of it. That's right. So um, Like I was saying, things can reflect color all the time, but as long as there's not something there to perceive it, is there any Is there really any color there? Well that's a philosophical question, but there's an answer to it, and the answer is no. If the tree falls in the woods and no one's around to here, it doesn't make annoyance. No. Actually, my my opinion on that one is yes, okay, but with color, Um, yeah, it doesn't exist without being perceived. I think it sound to me is different things. It's a bit of the brain melter. But I see what you're saying. Okay. So um. That leads you to the question of how do we see color? And that wasn't figured out until the eighteenth century, and it wasn't proven, I think, until the sixties. And there were a pair of guys who were a dynamic duo if I've ever heard of one before, And what were their names? Well, Thomas Young he was I thought he was kind of the main guy. Had never heard of the other guy, Herman von Helmholtz. Yeah, Thomas Young. Um. What I read was that he was the first to propose the trichromatic theory basically that we see everything through red, green, and blue channels because that's how our eyes pick up on color. Yeah, because we have specialized cells in our eyes called cones, right, and I think we have something like, um, a hundred million or some ridiculous amount of rods. And rods are the things that we see in like fine detail, black and white typically, right, cones are color perceiving sy and each cell is specialized. You either attuned to wavelengths that red, green, or blue. Yeah, you have way more rods than cones, about a hundred and twenty million rods in each eye and only only about six million cones in each eye. And those cones are concentrated mostly in the front of your retina in the middle, right, which is why you don't see color periphetally quite as well, that's right. So, um, these cells are attuned to different wavelengths, right, The long wavelengths are red, medium is green, and short is blue. Like you said medium was yellow. No, that's in the middle, okay, right, so medium is not in the middle, well as far as our RGB goes, okay, Yeah, And so with these cells, chuck, if you're looking at your blue horse. What was his name, Calvin the Blue Horse. So if you're looking at Calvin the Blue Horse, you're getting a lot of information on from short wavelength light, not so much at the longer medium wavelengths, right, And so there's probably a little bit it's not a true blue horse, right, which would mean that it was a totally saturated blue, which is only that blue wavelength, true blue wavelength. Coming to your eyes, there's probably a little bit of green, a little bit of red. And so all the cones in your eyes are getting all of this information at once, and they're reporting to your brain via electrical impulses about the quality of the wavelengths of light that they're getting. And so your brain takes it and basically becomes a color mixer and creates the color blue that you're seeing. Calvin ass that's how we detect color. And from the R and the G and the B you can put together. Supposedly, the Commission on Illumination, a European Commission on illumination back in one determined that humans can see something like two point three eight million colors. Oh, it's such a hundred million, now, is it? Because I've seen all over the place in this findings are the ones that people say, this has the best science behind it. Yeah, now I'm sorry. Ten million Okay. The other thing about the c I E Is that people say, well, this was only under certain types of illumination. I think three different types of illumination, so it is entirely possible if you change the intensity or whatever, you're going to have brand new colors. So ten millions reasonable. That's a lot of colors that we can see all from the red, the green, and the blue cones coming together and your brain adjusting them and seeing, oh, well that's um burnt sienna. Did you Yeah, this sort of the go to joke color, right, it is a pretty jokey color. It's a good one. Uh yeah, it's pretty amazing. Ten million colors, or let's say it's two million, if you're going by you know, naming convention. Shall we talk about some of the characteristics of color. Yeah, but let's take a break first. It is getting heavy, all right, so if you um actually you can do this on your modern television as well. But it seemed like most TVs now kind of come fairly set up. But in the old days, when you have those little wheels to try and get that color right. It was. You know, you might have noticed things that said hugh and intensity or value or tone and all that stuff. Those are all color characteristics, and hugh specifically is um. I mean, that's basically what the color is. It's not the lightness of the darkness. It's you know, it's the greenness or the redness or the blueness that's the hue. Yeah, it's it's what you can interchange that word with color. Yeah, exactly. UM. I like how they refer to as the identity of a color sounds kind of personal. Uh. The intensity is how pure it is so um. Like we said, most colors are mixes, you know, they bleed one way or the other on the wavelength. But in its purest form a single wavelength um, which is really rare, that would be the purity or the intensity of the color. Um. You're not gonna see that very often though. No, And I was wondering, like, that's pretty cool. There's some physics labs somewhere that can produce pure saturated green, like unadulterated green or unadulterated blue. There is there has to be. Yeah, probably that is gotta be really something to see to know you're looking at green, like think but green, I would like to see that sometime. Yeah, and I have, UM, I'm not color blind, but I have a more difficult time picking out other cues in a color, whereas Emily is really good, like when picking out paint colors, like that gray has this and this and this and it, and I'm like, really like I see gray. Well, supposedly a lot of people have a color deficiency. I might have a slight color deficiency, and a lot of people don't realize that. Well, yeah, so a lot of people don't realize that they think that this is this color just looks like this and thinks everybody sees it that way and this in the case, and then it comes from a conversation where they're like, well, wait a minute, what do you mean you see a distinction between those? Well, but yeah, but in my case, it's hues. It's not like I see a completely different color or you know, black or everything just looks gray. I did UM a brain stuff on color blindness. It is pretty interesting. Yeah. I went to UM research that one time for a show, and it would just like bent in my mind so much. I'd quietly file it away, so I'm sure you'll pick it next week. Color blindness, Yeah, Um. Value is the lightness or darkness of a color, and that's basically has to do with light. Um, the energy of the light that makes it up. Yeah, and the value is um, so he was. There's really just kind of a finite, very finite number of colors of hues, right. Um. And you think of like primary colors, which we'll talk about soon. Um. But when you adjust something, when you adjust them the value of it, that just creates a whole new range of colors. So if you add a little black to a color, what you're doing is shading it. Yeah. If you add white, you are creating a tint. And then if you add black and white gray, you're toning it. Yeah. Right, And I think people interchange those words without understanding what they mean. Yeah, but they are definite distinct things, and um that we should probably say. There's a lot of really neat sights on the internet. Pantone is a really good one, um, where you can go look at color wheels and things like that and see the distinction between these things and be like, oh, you mean pastels. That's another word for a tone. Yeah, And it's a lot of people get really get into it because it's the basis of printing and art and photography, and like every every sort of art form, well not every art form, but many art forms boil down to color. So if you go to art school, you're gonna study color pretty deeply. Yeah, you know, and one of the things you're gonna study is color theory. And color theory is based on the idea that certain colors can contrast one another, certain colors complement one another, certain colors should never be used together. And not that it's just you know, um, your instructor says saying these colors don't go together. It's not just search his opinion. These are objective facts as far as color theory goes, and it's all based on um. These the idea that all colors fall into one of two categories. You have additive colors and subtractive colors. Yeah, and there's a couple of I mean, there's two distinct applications for both of these. If you're talking about a computer screen or or a television, that's that's using light, so it's additive. Um. If you're talking about paint or photography, that's subtractive, right, So you can think of it this way. With additive colors, you're starting with black and you're adding light to it, and ultimately, when you add all these additive colors together, you're going to have white. With subtractive colors, you start with white, and when you add all these colors together, you're ultimately going to have black. And they subtract by absorbing one another's colors. Yeah, that's another color mind bender two because with subtract active color, you're still adding colors, but it's not additive, right to wrap your head around that. Yeah, but there's there's subtracting wavelengths by combining colors and absorbing them, right, Yeah, it takes a hue out. So a really good example of subtractive colors is if you take um cyane. Cyan absorbs orange red, right, So if you take cyane and you mix it with yellow, you produce green. And the reason that cyane and yellow produced green, it's because the cyane absorbs the red light and the yellow light. The yellow absorbs blue violet, and so the only color that's not subtracted or absorbed is green. So green is produced from these other pigments absorbing all the other wavelengths, and with an additive coloring, additive pigments, it's it's quite the opposite. You have um light combining to form new colors. Rather than absorbing, you're adding to it. Yeah, and like the apple is an example, like we said earlier, of a subtractive color system um and again, like a TV screen would be additive. I think we I think we got that. Yeah, I mean it is mine bending a little bit. Some of the stuff, you know, I have to read like ten times and then it sinks in. But the the reason that all colors can be turned into either additive primaries or subtractive primaries is that these are the six colors. Of these they're the six spectral colors. They're the rainbow colors, right, So additive primaries are what red, green, and blue the correct Yeah, and then the subtractive colors are cyan yellow and um magenta ye I was gonna say magenta. They're almost like bizarro colors. They're the bizarro world. Primary colors. When you think of primary colors, you think of like the the what red, yellow, and blue, because ye, red, yellow, and blue were the traditional primaries and they still are. But um when it comes to like painting and printing. They've been replaced with cyan, magenta, yellow and black. K. Yeah, when you go to your clubhouse printer, Yeah, that's what you're gonna be seeing C M K. Or you can select r G B as well, red, green and blue. So Crosby stills Nash and Young, right or Crosby Stills in Nash. Yeah. Okay, that's the difference. That's a good rule of thumb. Man. All right, So we mentioned primary colors just a second ago, and then we have our secondary colors, green, orange, and purple hues would you get from mixing the primary colors, and then you have something called tertiary colors, which is this furthering the color hues by mixing primary colors with secondary colors. Right, So the six tertiary colors and the two sets of primary colors or the six secondary colors, I think in the two sets of primary colors form the color wheelers twelve colors in the color wheel, and tertiary colors are the ones that you'll hear like blue, green or red violet. Yeah, it's like literally named the two colors, and color naming is another rabbit hole that you can go down. There's a site. Um man, I wish I'd written it down, but it's if you type in like who names colors or color naming or something like that in Google, like one of the one of the first page entries is the site that you go through and um, it shows you different colors and you write what you would name that color? Interesting, butter yellow or something like that, right, and the whole well that was the as far as I got. Mike Well, I would call it butter yellow. Hungry had other things to do. But um, you can go through and just I think it's like two enter twenty different shades that they show you, colors that they show you, and the the the whole purpose of all this is to find some sort of commonality to create universal A universal naming convention for colors makes um because you know, there is a lot of distinction among languages for naming colors. But at least one study that I found decided that all colors universally for societies that do recognize individual colors, rather than these are just warm colors and these are cool colors, which is universal. Um. The more primary the color, the shorter and easier to remember the name of it. Is like across culture, so not all cultures will call it blue. But what a culture is going to have like another like short monosyllabic name for that color, for the same thing that we would call blue. That's pretty interesting just because it's easier to understand. It's just it's basic, like colors appear to be basic universally. All right, I think we should take another break and maybe come back and talk a little bit about how colors can complement each other and live in harmony and what that all means to us. Okay, all right, we're back were Uh So we talked about the different uh primary color, secondary, and tertiary. And there's also something called complementary colors, which are basically contrasting colors that make a neutral color when put together, and they are really far apart and hugh as far apart as they can be. And there if you look at the color wheel there on the complete opposite side from one another, right um. And when you place them next to each other, then their hue is like, uh, I guess it's just more robust looking. Yeah, because they complement one another, right um. Yeah, complimentary doesn't necessarily mean like, oh, they look great together. Under all circumstances. So, um, some complementary colors like red and green, if you play them next to each other in the same intensity and the same size, it's another one. You are going to have what's called an eyesore. I have a shirt like that. It's just too much equal amounts of bright red and bright green. Trying to think of that shirt. It's just a Christmas shirt? Is it retired? Well, it's it's a holiday shirt. Um. But the whole point of having colors and using colors together isn't just like, well, these two are opposite the color wheel, so I'm gonna use them in equal amounts and equal intensity and everything will be right. You have to achieve what's called color harmony. Um. And in doing that, you want to choose different um, different shades or different tones or different tints, and also different amounts at once. So like you're going to use a bunch of red and a little bit of green as an accent. That would be much more harmonious than equal amounts of intense red and green next to each other. Yeah, and again this is um. When we say it's not a matter of taste, that's like picking something out as a matter of taste. But again, these are like scientific rules. You can't just throw two colors together and say that looks great or that they're harmonious. Um. I mean, I guess you could, but you'd be wrong. You would surge would be like, you're wrong. This is objective stuff. And then with complimentary colors. Getting back to that, there's this really cool thing that they bring up called retinal fatigue. So you can do a little experiment at home that's kind of blows your mind, but it really illustrates how color works pretty well. If you look at a bright red spot for about a minute, um, your retinas are going to soak in all that red, all those cones are And then when you go immediately and look at a white surface, uh, you're gonna see green briefly, not forever, right, And the reason why is because your red cells have just been basically overstimulated and they're gonna respond weekly to the information that they're getting from that white, right, and your blue and green cells are gonna be functioning just fine, so they're gonna easily overwhelm your red cells. And so what you'll see is this ghost image of like a cyan square. Yeah, which is why, uh, and the reason why it is because red is the complement of green will always be that opposite. It doesn't just like randomly pick out a color. I know, And if you start adding all this stuff together that there are objectively complementary colors that you see when you see too much of the opposite one, doesn't it all seem to fit so cleanly together that you're almost like, what is going on here? Like? What is color? Why do we see color? Yeah, it's a really good question, and evolutionary biologists have not been able to explain it fully. Yeah, I guess I really never thought about that because there's well, I mean, there's probably some evolutionary benefit, right, like green things are generally good to eat. Yeah, but green is also the the kind of a universal color for disgust or sickness or illness, like you're green because you're green around the gills or something like that. Green is often like the color of rot. But it's true, I mean, it's both. So how how do we evolve to understand the nuanced And I mean clearly, if we didn't evolve to see in color so that we could do this, we have as a byproduct of it. But we can very easily tick off whether something is healthy for us dangerous. Um. We we get a lot of information about an object in our environments, quality and desirability based on its color. It's almost like a shorthand that our brains pick up. Yeah, And part of that is because we're conditioned after years of using green for go and green for safe passage, and like red or orange for hazard signs and stop signs. So part of that's conditioning. But as far as like going back many many years before we made stop signs, I have no idea. Yeah, you know, it really makes you wonder. And even like the idea that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, that's a fairly recent development. Prior to I think the early twentieth century, it was the opposite. Did we ever do that as a show or didn't? It was too short? I think we did, like a video one or something. Didn't we maybe I seem to remember that, But it was the opposite until like the the interesting Yeah, yeah, that's interesting totally. Is that's why you rock your pink shirts? Well, yeah, right, that's exactly why that action. So getting back to harm harmonious colors, uh, if they are side but and This is if you're like picking out colors in your house or whatever. If you're not very good at it, there are a few hard and fast rules. Um, colors that are and get your little color wheel out is really handy. If they're side by side, Uh, they're gonna harmonize well. Um. And like we mentioned, colors directly across from one another. Complimentary ones also go well in the right proportions because, like you said, the size of it makes a big difference. They point out in the article. I don't if you've ever seen someone who's like painted their room red, like in college, you know, some stupid room hate would do that. It's an assault on your senses because you're not used to seeing that much red. But maybe an accent wall in a shade of red matched with a complimentary color, you would want it red and green room though it gets green as complimented or red. No, but you could conceivably say, um, use the complementary color for like the trim or something like that. Yeah, exactly, Um. And then tents and shades and tones of the same color are always okay together. It's never gonna clash. But um, you're just gonna have to mess around with like how much of one compared to the other and what places your eye Yes, no, and so again Surge is is saying like, no, there's objective truth as to complementary colors and harmonious colors, but there is also personal preference. And this is kind of like the thorn in the side of the whole idea of color psychology that people use colors to manipulate other people into, like buying a product or whatever. Study after study keeps finding that color preferencing color symbolism is extremely personal. It's based on past experience, on your upbringing, on your culture. Like for example, here in the West we wear black from mourning. Yeah, well, in the East, white is the color from mourning. So there's a lot of culturally bound ideas about color too, which keeps it from being like universally symbolic or whatever. But that being said, there are some that just from being exposed to it time and time again, like a red stoplight that you come to um identify symbolically with other stuff. Yeah, and colors will also affect everyone differently mood wise, but there are some generalities there too. Um Like blue is generally a soothing color that will calm you down. Um too much though could actually have the opposite effect, like too much blue on some people, or can really depress you. What blue can I wonder if that's why they say you're blue? Yeah? Yeah, I mean think about we describe our world like that, green with envy. Blue means you're down in the dumps. Red means are angry? Yeah, red faced or red neck? Wait, that's different. It's a little different. Warm colors, reds and yellows. Um can also lift the spirits if you're less excitable. Um. And they say that most people want to just strike a balance though, between the cool and the warm, right, And that's when it comes to like personal preference. Yeah, but the idea behind this is that a lot of people don't realize this is going on, that they're being affected by color, even though they are. That it's on a very unconscious level. Yeah. And it also depends a lot on light, like how much light a room has coming into it, because you're gonna because sunlight is different than artificial light, your shirt's gonna look at different color outside in the sun as it might. Uh. And I remember when we did the TV show, there was a lot of um with colors and stuff. You know, things would look different outside than they would under studio lights. Right. Well, what's neat though, is we humans have developed this trick called color constancy, where, um, if you look at something, even if it's in the shadow or in the sunlight, it should conceivably look like different colored things because of the illumination. But to us, we're still like, no, that's still green, just because there's you know, shadow blocking it now, I still see it as green. It doesn't make any sense, and it's kind of perplexed. Um. I guess, uh biologists for a while trying to figure out what this is, or neurologists, and they figured out that yes, it is in the brain. Um. And there was this one guy who had some sort of brain damage, I think from an electric shock, and he also went for all intensive purposes blind but he could still see color, but he didn't have color constancy. So they figured out that this guy was detecting wavelengths of light color even though he couldn't see anything. He could see colors still, but color constancy wasn't there. So they figured out, well, that means that it's a trick of the brain. Very neat, it's very cool um. They also ing up in the in the House of Works article something. I think it's pretty interesting how certain because of conditioning, certain colors can just appear to be wrong. Like if you were to pull up and see a green stop sign, it would freak you out. Or the example the Houston here is if you cracked an egg and there was a green egg yolk um, that would be really freaky too, because you're just so used to that yellow. You know, you'd think, well, this is disease or something, yeah, or dr seust you know, uh what else you got? Did you look at that thing on pigment I did. There's some wacky ways people have made pigments, yeah, I mean pigment um. As far as making paint in things. Uh, Now, they're synthetic, synthetic, you know, like they're synthesizing laboratories, which makes sense. But throughout all of history, up until they started doing that, they were actual, uh, real things in the ground and on the earth that they would grind up into powder. Um. In the case of blue, there was a semi precious stone called, or there still is called Lepis Lazuli that was found all over the place in Afghanistan. And that's how they made blue. Um Azure or azure right, is a blue mineral of copper. So all of them, uh, most of them have a few different ways they can make it. Um red. I think we've talked about cinnabar before. The mineral is where you get vermilion red and carmine. Carmine is bright red and that comes from aluminum salt of carminic acid. So it's just crazy that they found all these things in the world to make. And I know blue is the toughest one because you don't see blue very much in nature. Um. I think blue is the one you will see least in the primary colors as far as nature goes, like some insects, but like there's no blue food. Um, yeah, that's true. Blue horses, No, Well, what about mine? My favorite was India Yellow, where they would feed cows nothing but mango leaves and then collect their urine and then boil it down, then filter out the concentrated muck and then make balls out of it. And there was the basis of your pigment. It's pretty cool stuff. So those are just a few. If you really get into pigments, and you can like go crazy trying to figure out where they all came from. Definitely, And um, I mean again, this is like really just the surface of color. There's so much to it, and um, I strongly advise you to go out and learn more about it. Color it's everywhere. How about the one last factoid? Why is the sky blue? Oh, it's a good one. Guy's not really blue. No, it shouldn't really have any color. But the angle of the sun coming down on the upper atmosphere um encounters things like water, vapor, and other tiny particles, and they tend to scatter blue wavelength light more than the other colors, right, so that it's just bouncing around at all points, which is why the sky is blue. It's say, like noontime. But while the sky is blue at noontime over here, it's say sunrise or sunset to the east or the west. And since all that blue light is getting scattered over you where it's noontime in the in the east of the west, those reds and yellows and pinks are making it all the way there and the blue is not, which is why sunrise and sunset it tends to appear reddish, whereas like mid day appears blue yeah, which is it makes total sense. And when your kids ask you why is the sky blue? You can tell him. You can tell them like the real reason you can be like color does not actually exist. It's all lie. Good luck with that, go to sleep. If you want to know more about color, just type that word in your favorite search engine or how stuff works. That common and will take you on a wild ride. And since I said wild ride, it's time for listener mail. Uh. I'm to call this something I've never heard of before. Precocious puberty. Uh you ever heard of that? Yeah, we talked about it, did we early puberty? Okay, did we talk about that? I guess this is in girls, So maybe that's why got you surprised me. I'm a long time listener, and thanks for helping me in my commute every day. Really enjoyed and giggled my way through the episode of male puberty. Um, thanks so much for mentioning precocious puberty. Well, there you have it. I was diagnosed at age two after my mom came to wake me before school one day. Now before preschool. This is a lady. Uh, And she had started her period at two years old, and as you can imagine, my mom was terrified. It took a long time to get a correct diagnosis since it is pretty rare. My treatment started out as daily shots that my mom gave me at home UM that then went to weekly, monthly, and annually as a year's progressed. I also had intermittent stays in the hospital for testing. Poor kid. I know. Treatment was stopped when I reached twelve years old, essentially pressing play of my puberty that have been on pause for almost in years. Let's let's see that's cool treatment. Yeah, I mean it's amazing that they figured out how to stall puberty. Yeah, they're like, stay stay, Okay. I have only hazy memories of this, of course, as I was a child, but I do remember that missing UM shots caused quite a bit of pain since my body was growing out of control. Essentially never been able to find out what the long term effects might be. But I've had a pretty decent health into my adult life and I'm now thirty one years old. Awesome, So thanks a lot. And that is from Lauren in California. Well, thanks a lot. Lauren. Appreciate that we love hearing from people with real life experiences and stuff we just talk about that's right, you know. Uh. If you want to let us know about your real life experience, we want to hear it. You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast, to how stuff Works dot com, and, as always, joined us at home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how Stuff Works dot com