Humans
PUBLISHED
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Colors are not a static entity, but are subjective both personally and culturally. So it’s no surprise that people continue to be fascinated by an online quiz based on the arbitrary boundary between blue and green. Sure, navy and forest are very different shades. So are emerald and sapphire. But where do you place turquoise? Is it green or is it blue?
The test by ismy.blue — which can be found here — simply asks you to decide between shades of green and blue. Click on a button and place the color in one of the two camps. After a few selections, you are given a boundary hue.
For full disclosure, I am Team Blue. Turquoise is definitely blue to me, but I can see the cultural influence of my Italian upbringing. Turchese, celeste (sky-blue), azzurro (azure) are commonly used in everyday parlance, and they are not just "blue". We also use verde-acqua or aquamarine, a color between green and cyan.
The connection and overlap between green and blue is common in many languages. In Japanese, Thai, Korean, and the Lakota language, the word for blue is used to describe color shades that include what English-speaking people might refer to as green. In Welsh, the word for blue came from the word for green: the literal translation of grass (glaswellt) is "green straw", but glas is used for blue.
To appear distinct, colors need to have a specific name. For example, the Himba people, an Indigenous population in Northern Namibia, don’t have a separate word to distinguish blue from green. When tested on distinguishing two colors that are different to Western eyes, they were not very successful. But for the Himba, shades that we would describe as green have different names, and researchers have found that some hues that are indistinguishable to most Westerners are dramatically different to the Himba.
Is my blue your blue? Probably not. A good reminder that our subjective perspective can skew our perception of factual reality, and that it is important to consider how others see the world. But also, turquoise is definitely blue!
An earlier version of this story was published in September 2024.
