I ask this with full sincerity: Is there anything more scientifically interesting than color perception? There’s a LOT of interesting STEM stuff out there, don’t get me wrong. I took Astronomy classes in college because space is cool as shit. (It’s basically the only thing Elon Musk and I seem to agree on.) I worked for a company that created metrology units, ones so precise that I had to learn what a micron was in order to be impressed. Medical science has done, and continues to do, things that are wonderful and insane and revolutionary. My mom had arthroscopic knee surgery in the mid-2000s and it put her on the shelf for weeks; she had another one in the early 2010s and was walking basically the next day. Science is cool as Hell.
But color science? That’s next level.
Think about the way we, as humans, perceive color. You guys know about the visible light spectrum, right?
Makes sense, right? We can see the colors of the rainbow, essentially in ROYGBIV order. But the visible light spectrum is only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. Check it out:
This also makes sense: We know these other types of waves exist, but we can’t see them. Even crazier, they can be harmful to us! That’s why they make you wear a lead vest when you get x-rays taken and a … uh, lead and concrete vest for when you go … hunting for gamma rays? (I don’t know what gamma rays are.) All told, Energy.gov notes that we can only observe 0.0035% of this entire spectrum.
And think of the variability within that 0.0035%! We have different flavors of colorblindness, to say nothing of more serious vision problems like glaucoma, astigmatisms, nearsightedness and farsightedness, and so forth. I mean, who could forget this seminal moment in Internet history?
Yeah. This thing has its own Wikipedia page. The only reason it became any sort of phenomenon is because … well, it’s because social media is a horrifying Hellscape that has moved our species closer to extinction than it’s ever been, but the stated reason is because people perceive this clearly blue-and-black dress as a white-and-gold dress. Even though there is a “right” answer, it’s still sort of an optical illusion depending on who you are — or, more accurately, how you see.
As for me? I know my vision is good. I’ve never needed glasses despite both my parents needing them since childhood. I know I’m not colorblind. But how good is my color perception?
Thankfully, there’s a test for that.
The X-Rite Color Challenge and Hue Test, as it seems to be formally known, is the short, free version of the full Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test. In both, the goal is the same: the left-most and right-most blocks are anchored, and your job is to sort the colors in perfect hue order so the end result looks like a smooth spectrum. Take the bottom bar in the image above as an example. It’s nowhere near proper order because the far left block is purple and the one immediately next to it is more like a salmon pink. The idea would be to move that somewhere further right.
Now that I know there’s a full version, though, I kind of want to take that. Let’s see here, looks like that’ll cost me …
… alright, so the free test it is.
Sidenote: I LOVE the specificity of this price. $826? What, was $825 not cutting it in terms of profit margins? Did the test cost exactly $413 to develop with a targeted 50% profit? I have so many questions. Probably the main one, though, is: Who the fuck would pay $826 out of pocket for a test like this???
Additional sidenote: I absolutely would do that if I had the $826 to spare.
Alright, for the free version, I’m gonna get sorting. If my eyes aren’t glazed over from analyzing slight hue variances for 10 minutes or whatever, I’ll see you guys when I’m done.
For your reading pleasure while I take the test, enjoy this theme-appropriate visualization of LEGO brick colors over time, courtesy of WaPo.
The results are in! How did I do?
Ohhhhhh baby! That’s a 0! Looks like I failed — to fuck up this test! Heyo!
Turns out my vision isn’t just good, it’s also — within the context of hue discrimination — perfect. No misses. From reds to greens to blues and all the way around, I can rank colors by hue with perfect accuracy. Now I’m really tempted to do the full version, to see if that holds true over 100 unique hues instead of 40.
What’s fun is that, despite a “perfect” score, the best score for my gender is -2,147,483,648. I believe this score was achieved by a spectrometer wearing glasses and a trench coat.
So there we go: I’ve learned that my vision is excellent. I’m not sure how useful this skill will be in my future, though. Anyone looking to hire a guy who can sort a warehouse full of shirts by hue? I’m available!