Color and Culture

Guys - if you've ever been dragged to the makeup counter with a lady, you understand the graphic below.  Besides the fact that women see color better than men (and some have super color vision too), we just don't "see" color differences so finely (physiologically or psychologically).  This was going around the Web and came across our Google Reader, and elicited chuckles and a few "so true" comments: 

What also came around a while ago was a chart made of the Crayola crayon colors over time.  (Another blogger used Photoshop to create alternative versions of the chart.)  Of course they've added more colors, but what's cool about this chart is that it shows how the colors were deconstructed, and when.  By the way, the chart's creator identified something akin to Moore's Law, that he called Crayola'a Law:  the number of Crayola colors doubles every 28 years.

Of course, people often experience colors today in electronic media rather than print.  This chart shows the most common color names (and their shades) as named be people in the amazing online color survey (more on this below).  

Basically, XKCD's website survey showed people a color and asked them to name it (survey is now closed, but you can still take it here - NOTE:  link is not working anymore... maybe he'll put it back online...).  The results were interesting, and also hilarious (great link).  I guess people went crazy after a while trying to give names to color after color, and started typing crazy comments for the different colors shown to them.  Here are the examples XKCD gave from some participants:

Finally, I thought this was especially interesting.  Beyond the differences between men and women, this shows the emotional connection that different cultures around the world have with the color spectrum.

Some things are commmon:

• Evil = black
• Truce and Purity = white
• Anger, Passion, and Desire = red

But others vary considerably:

• Balance (orange, black green)
• Good Luck (red, green)
• Happiness (red, white, green, yellow)
• Love (red, yellow, green)

What do you think?