3 Curious Stories About Colour

I am fascinated by colour. How we perceive it, how it shows up in nature, how plants and animals use it to their advantage, and how we use it to interpret our world.

As humans, vision is the sense we rely on above all others, yet paradoxically, we see a shorter spectrum of colours than other species as we cannot see either infrared or ultraviolet. Despite using vision as our primary sense, colour offers very few practical biological advantages to us. We aren’t pollinators who use colour to find flowers, nor do we use coloured plumage to attract mates. Regardless, colour is intrinsic to how we view the world. We’re drawn to it; creating art and filling our homes and gardens with a diverse palette. Here are three stories about colour that caught my eye:

Colour vision evolved first

Intuitively, it seems logical that the use of colour as a biological advantage would have developed concurrently with the ability to perceive different hues. However, science shows us that the ability to see colours evolved 400-500 million years ago and predates brightly coloured fruits (the earliest type of biological advantage from colour) by as much as 200 million years. 

Following colouration of seeds and fruits, flowering plants evolved 300 million years ago, with colours used for warnings (don’t eat me!), and finally, attractive colouring for courtship displays arising 100 million years ago. We don’t fully know why colour vision arose so much earlier, but scientists hypothesize that the ability to see colour would have made vision more acute, allowing organisms to more easily discern the features of their environments. 

Our screens can’t see colour as well as we do

Humans can see over a million colours but the technology we increasingly rely on to view or capture the world around us shows far fewer. Essentially, the range of colours produced by a screen, whether that’s a television, a digital camera, or a smartphone are limited by the technology that creates them. This range of colours is a fraction of what we can actually see, especially in greens and cyans. 

These limitations on colours go back to the development of colour televisions and screens, when the first colour standards were established. Although technology has advanced, the standard remains the same and many colours simply do not appear in our digital world. They do, however, appear in the real world, where we can see vibrant green leaves, cyan bird feathers, and deep blue butterflies that appear almost other worldly. And they also appear in everyday, human-made objects, such as the turquoise-green of a traffic light. This is why photos of nature (and traffic lights) can sometimes be disappointing. Technology is unable to capture the world as we see it. 

Nature remains our main inspiration for colour

I’ve written before about how colour nomenclature draws from the natural world. It’s interesting to think about how our standardized colour palettes extend from flowers and animals to our computer screens, especially given the limitations of the latter. 

The initial attempts at categorizing colours used plants, animals, and minerals as reference samples to define a specific hue. Formulas were then developed to allow colours to reliably be mixed using paint. The best known of these systems was created by Abraham Werner in 1821 and was refined by Robert Ridgeway in 1886 to include 1,115 colours.

The first colour computer displays were capable of rendering 256 colours, a significant reduction from Ridgeway’s system. However, echoes of the nature-based standards remain, even in this digital system, with colour names such as corn silk, pale goldenrod, and thistle encoded into digital colour palettes. 

It’s clear that our attempts to name and process colour remains deficient to capture the full range of colour that exists in the world. Our naming systems and digital screens are inadequate to describe the world we live in. No matter how precise the colour match or how beautiful the photo, it will always pale in comparison to the real thing.