Jane: This is But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids from Vermont
Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions
from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. What's your
favorite color? Colors are all around us. When you walk into a
room, if you're a sighted person, you might notice that
the walls are painted in yellow, gray or white, or off-white, or
eggshell white or creamy white. When you pick out your socks in
the morning, do you grab a different colored pair depending
on your mood? Red, if you're feeling feisty, purple if you're
feeling bold? Flowers come in all kinds of striking hues. And
if you've ever looked at a female cardinal, you'll see the
most beautiful gradations of brown and gold, from her amber
colored chest to her soft gray brown back and a tuft of red at
the crest of her head. We've gotten lots of questions from
you about color, and that's not surprising, because colors
really are everywhere.
Eleanor: My name is Eleanor, and I'm eight years old, and I'm
from Georgia. And where do colors come from?
Hannah: My name is Hannah. I'm from Detroit, Michigan. I'm six
years old. Where do colors come from?
Jane: Let's first talk about what we mean when we say color.
Color has a lot to do with light. When light shines on an
object, that object absorbs certain wavelengths of light and
reflects other ones. The material the object is made out
of determines what wavelengths are absorbed and which ones are
reflected. Our eyes only see the light that has reflected, or
bounced off the object, not the light that is absorbed. And our
brain interprets those wavelengths that have bounced
off as different colors. For example, let's say you have a
Jane: let you know what colors you're seeing, but it also then
nice, ripe strawberry. The strawberry's skin is soaking up
blue and green wavelengths and bouncing the red light back to
your eyes! So you see that strawberry as red. But how do we
know if our brains are all interpreting that red color the
same way? Midhaa, who is 11, from Kerala, India, has a question.
associates those colors with feelings and experiences. For
this part of the conversation, let's bring in our special
guest.
Kassia St. Clair: I am Kassia St. Clair, and I am a writer.
Jane: Kassia is the author of a book called The Secret Lives of
Color. She's been fascinated by color for a long time. When she
was a kid, Kassia's mom was a florist, so she spent a lot of
time at the flower shop after school, observing what kinds of
colors go together in a bouquet of flowers and what types of
flowers are popular for certain occasions. When Kassia became an
adult, she decided to learn and write about colors. In fact, she
wrote a whole book about them. Kassia's work focuses on the
ways we think about colors and how they take on different
cultural meanings.
Kassia St. Clair: The process of how we see color, an awful lot
of it takes place in our brains, and that means that even if the
architecture of everyone's eyes is roughly similar, what's
happening in the brain, kind of behind the scenes can be very,
very different and can be really influenced by our own
experiences. So for example, imagine if you grew up in a
bedroom, and the walls of your bedroom were painted blue, and
you loved your bedroom, forever after, you might have really
positive associations about the color blue. Now, someone else
might feel very differently about blue. They might associate
it with a time they got really embarrassed at school and the
walls of that room were blue so. So your experience of color will
be very different. And the other thing is that not everyone's
eyes are the same. Lots of people have something that's
called color blindness, or color vision deficiency, and so you
might perceive color slightly differently, and that's a lot
more common in boys and men than it is in women, because the
parts of our DNA which are responsible for our eyesight are
encoded in in the part of the DNA that is kind of more present
for women than it is for men. And as technology is now
emerging to kind of correct color vision, so if you do have
color blindness, there are now kind of glasses that you can put
on that can allow you to better perceive the colors that you
might have naturally struggled with.
Jane: In my family, we have arguments about the difference
between blue and purple, and some things that my daughter and
I say that is absolutely purple. It's no question. It's purple,
and then my son and his dad will say, Are you kidding? That's
blue. There's no way it's purple. It's not even close to
purple. It's just blue. And that's all there is to it. And
we can sit in our corners and never agree on that, and it's
impossible for us to tell, are we seeing different things with
our brains, or are we seeing the same color fundamentally, and we
just think of it in different categories, and it's always kind
of a fun fight for us, because it's just clear how different
our brains see things and how differently we interpret things,
but we don't know whether it's something physical in our brains
or just in the way we think about what category it is.
Kassia St. Clair: It's so mysterious how we, how each
person sees color. I love that there's all this, this mystery.
I think it makes it such a great topic to study.
Eleanor: Hi, my name is Abilene. I'm eight years old. I live in
Scotts Valley, California. Why are like dogs can't see that
many colors, but humans can and why is vision for different
animals different?
Susanna: Hi, but why? My name is Susanna. I live in Arkansas, and
I'm 10 years old. Why do dogs see different colors than
humans?
Jane: We said that most people have three types of cones in our
retinas that help us detect different colors. Dogs have only
two so they see fewer colors than we do. Dogs can't really
distinguish red from other colors, but they can see blue
and yellow. So if you've ever seen a dog having trouble
finding a red ball in a green field, that's probably because
the red doesn't stand out against the green grass in their
eyes, they all look like kind of the same shades of muddy brown.
But then again, my dog can smell and hear things way better than
I do, and dogs can see better in the dark than we can. So I guess
you win some, you lose some. You know, some animals actually have
a much wider range of color reception than dogs, or us,
humans. Birds, for example, are known to have four types of
cones, those color sensitive receptors in their eyes, where
we have three. Butterflies have five, and mantis shrimp have 12
to 16 photoreceptors and can even see infrared and polarized
light. It's fun to imagine what the world would look like if you
had the ability to see even more colors or more wavelengths of
light. The world might look very different. We have more color
questions coming up, including, how do colors get their names?
And is white a color?
This is But Why. I'm Jane Lindholm, and today we're
talking with Kassia St. Clair, author of The Secret Lives of
Color. She's answering your colorful questions.
Freya: Hi, I'm Freya. I'm six years old, and how is colors
invented?
Parker: My name is Parker. I'm six years old. I live in
Birmingham, Alabama. Who discovered color?
Jane: Color has kind of always been around. As long as there's
been light, there's been color, because color is really how we
perceive wavelengths of light that bounce off of other
objects. But beyond that, there's also the way we think
and talk about color, and humans have found lots of ways to make
pigments so we can have different colored toys and
clothes and crayons and paints.
Kassia St. Clair: Colors come from lots of different places.
Is it a paint that you have in a tube that you paint a picture
with? Or is it a paint that you put on the wall of your house?
Or is it a color of a jumper or a pair of trousers? All of those
colors will come from slightly different places, and most of
the time today, the colors that we use will be made in a
factory. There'll be combinations of different kinds
of chemicals, substances that scientists work with and put
them together in different combinations, and they create
something new, but in the olden days, so, you know, maybe 200
years ago and before then, people weren't generally using
chemicals to make color, or they sometimes were, but more often,
they were using the colors that are found naturally in the world
around us, and there are actually quite a lot of those.
So there are colors in the soil. So depending on where you live,
you might be able to go outside, you might notice that the soil
is different colors. The other places where you might find
color are in insects. So lots of insects create color, or indeed,
snails, sea snails create color.
Alaina: I'm Elena, and I'm eight years old, and I'm from Alberta,
Canada. How many colors are in the world?
Addison: My name is Addison. I live in Milford, Pennsylvania.
How many colors are in the world?
Gigi: Hi. My name is Gigi. I'm nine years old. I live in Sand
Springs, Oklahoma. Why are there so many different colors?
Jane: There are a couple different ways to think about
this question. Scientists say humans can see millions of
distinct color gradations with our eyes. But there's also
another way of looking at it that has to do with how colors
exist in our minds and our cultures, and Kassia says that
number is infinite.
Kassia St. Clair: The truth is that the number of colors that
there are is everlasting. We're all over the world, and no
matter where you are in the world, you'll be thinking about
colors in new ways, and that can change even over the course of
your lifetime. So, for example, I'm now 40 years old. When I was
growing up, the color avocado green had a really specific
meaning. It was seen as really old fashioned and and something
a color that had been really fashionable in the 1970s. But
now avocado green means something a bit different,
because the world has changed slightly. Avocados have become
much more associated with really young people with avocado toast,
which is something that you may or may not enjoy for your your
breakfast or your lunch, and maybe in ten years time, that
won't be one of the first things you think about. And that
process is happening all the time. We're constantly thinking
about colors in new ways.
Alan: My name is Alan. I am six years old. I live in Brewster,
New York. How do colors get their names?
Kassia St. Clair: So there's kind of two processes that
happen. There's a kind of official process, by which I
mean a company, for example, a company that makes paint for
your house or paint for your car might create a new color, and
then they'll sit in an office and they'll think about how best
to name it. So for example, if a nail polish company is creating
a new red polish at Christmas time, they would probably want
the name to indicate the redness of the color. But they probably
also want a name that is suggestive of Christmas, and so
they might call it Santa's Cape, for example, but the exact same
color, if it's being released in May or June, and this might have
a very different name. All of a sudden, it might be Apple Red or
something like that. But you also, again, have this kind of
more open process by which people, ordinary people, aren't
negotiating the names themselves. And so a really good
example of this is the color Scarlet, which is a bright shade
of red. Now, Scarlet actually, initially wasn't the name of a
color. It was the name of a type of cloth, a really beautiful,
very fine, very luxurious, very soft woolen cloth. And it made
sense, when you were producing such a wonderful cloth, to dye
it the most expensive color. No one wants to buy the most
beautiful cloth in the world and have it a color that is really
unfashionable, and the color that was most fashionable and
expensive at the time when Scarlet was the most beautiful
cloth, was a bright red. And over time, the color that this
cloth was always dyed borrowed the name for the type of cloth.
And so Scarlet went from being a type of cloth to a type of red.
Jane: So it would almost be as if cotton was a name for a
color, or polyester was a name of a color that we all identify.
Kassia St. Clair: Exactly.
Jane: What about the colors that are seen as just sort of your
basic colors of the rainbow? How do we get names for things like
red, orange, blue, yellow?
Kassia St. Clair: In English and in a lot of other languages, you
have kind of around about the same number of colors that we
all agree are the kind of basic colors, red, green, blue. But
that isn't the case for all languages. So not all languages
agree on what is a basic color. So some languages only have
three basic color terms. They will divide the entire spectrum
of all the colors in the rainbow into just three. They'll have
light colors, dark colors and red. Other languages and other
countries have, you know, divide the rainbow up differently. So
for example, in Russia and in the Russian language, blue isn't
one color, it's divided into two. There's light blue and
there's dark blue, siniy and goluboy. And in Korea, they
divide green up into two, regular green and kind of
yellowy green. And lots of languages have added or or
gotten rid of colors over time. So if you were to go to Japan
around about 100 years ago, they would have the same word for
both blue and green. They now have separate words, but that's
pretty recent. So yeah, the answer is that those basic color
terms depend on what your culture and what your language
believe is a basic color, and not all languages agree.
Jane: Think about that for a second. If you live in a place
with a language that differentiates between green and
blue, you might walk outside and say, hey, that car is green and
that other car is blue. But if you speak a language that sees
green and blue as one color, your brain will think, look,
there are two blue cars in slightly different shades!
Charlie: My name is Charlie. I'm six years old. I'm from Long
Beach, California. Is white a color or not?
Kassia St. Clair: So that's a really good question, and there
is a way that a physicist might answer it, and then there's the
way an everyday person would answer it. And a physicist would
tell you that white and black are not really colors, they're
more expressions of light. So if you've got the full spectrum of
visible light, you will perceive that as white. And if you've got
none of it, you will perceive that thing as black. But for
ordinary people, we go into a shop and we pick white paint, we
pick a black pair of jeans, and so we experience white and black
as colors. Those are useful color groups, and they are as
valid a color as blue or green. But they're not, these things
aren't perfectly white in the way that a physicist is thinking
of, as an expression of light, or perfectly black, the absence
of light, but they are in the category. They are a type of
black. They are a type of white. But it's very, very difficult to
experience pure white or pure dark. There's a substance that
was created a few years ago called vantablack, and that
substance absorbs 99.965% of the visible spectrum. So what this
looked like is, it's really uncanny. Essentially, you could
no longer see any depth in an object that's coated with the
substance. And what do I mean by that? So I was shown vantablack
on a piece of crumpled up aluminum or aluminum foil. So
ordinarily, when you see a piece of foil, you can see that it
has, it's got different textures. It's been scrumpled up
a little bit. Different areas of the foil reflect light in
different ways. And so you know that that object is 3D, you know
it's got bits that are further away from you and closer towards
you. But when you coat that same piece of foil with vantablack,
which absorbs 99.965% of the light, all you can see is a
flat, black space. You know that that is a piece of crumpled
foil, but you are no longer able to see any definition in the
foil at all. It just looks flat. And so a round ball looks the
same as a circle. And a car wouldn't like a car. It would
just look like an outline of a car. So it reduces our ability
to perceive depth.
Jane: I want to play a prank on my family now. I want to paint
all of my chairs vantablack and then say, go sit down. And
they'd be like but there's nothing to sit on. Because it
just it wouldn't, it would look like the shape of an outline of
a chair, but it wouldn't look like... I wouldn't be able to
see that there is a flat place for me to sit and a place for me
to put my back. It just looks like one solid...
Kassia St. Clair: Like a blob. Yeah,
Jane: that's very cool.
Kassia St. Clair: Very cool.
Jane: We've learned a lot today about how our eyes and brains
work together to interpret color and how different people and
cultures and languages think about colors differently. Let's
end with this question from Noah.
Noah: I live in South Salem, New York, and I'm 10 years old. Why
do colors make you feel different emotions?
Kassia St. Clair: So what you've got going on is you've got the
way that a kind of the broadest culture feel about a color. So
this is information that we pick up from the world around us. So
that includes adverts that we see, the language that we're
speaking with, and so on and so forth. So you have really broad
generalizations, like red is often associated with action, so
things like anger or stop or, you know, really kind of words
that need to be obeyed immediately, ideas that need to
be obeyed immediately, things that are sudden. And we kind of
take this understanding into our experience of the word red. You
then might have more specific things. You might have something
in your own city. You might have like the metro. All the metro
stations use red signage, and so that will probably make you
think of transport, even if you're not immediately aware
that that is part of your understanding of the color red.
It will inform your understanding of it. And then
you have, like, what I call the throw on the, on the sofa. You
then have the kind of your own personal experience of it. How,
how did you grow up? Did you have toys that were this
particular color when you were growing up? Was it your parents'
favorite color? Is it your favorite color? Did you choose
to name your dog Scarlet, for example? And all these things
will act together in our experience of how we feel about
a color. But you also have other things going on, possibly, and
this is where it becomes really difficult, because there is some
evidence, and lots of people believe that certain colors make
all humans feel a certain way, just because that's how we're
hard wired to behave. So lots of people believe that red, again,
to take the red example, makes us gives us kind of a jolt of
energy and makes us more aggressive, makes us more angry,
makes us more passionate. The problem is, is that it's
absolutely impossible to test for this in a in a scientific
way, because you cannot remove a human being from everything,
from their culture, and so you can't really completely unpick
what it is that's ingrained in all humans and what it is that
we grow up with and that we understand from living in the
world around us.
Jane: Right, because sometimes you'll hear people say, if you
want to create a calming environment for anybody who's
going to come into that room, you should paint the room yellow
or blue. I can't even remember which ones, but what you're
saying is we don't know if that's because everybody's brain
thinks of that color as a calming color, or if it's
because we think it's calming, because that's what we've grown
up with, and that's what our culture has told us. There's no
way to figure that out scientifically yet, at any rate.
Kassia St. Clair: Yet.
Jane: Is there any other story about color that you think just
blow everyone's mind?
Kassia St. Clair: Yeah, so I think a lot of people think of
pink as being quite a girly color and blue as being quite a
boyish color. But if you go back a hundred years, actually,
people thought of it completely the opposite way around. People
thought about pink as being a color for boys and blue as being
a color for girls. And if you look at the way that they talked
about blue and pink, then they said that pink was more decided,
it was more masculine, it was kind of more aggressive, and
blue was more gentle and feminine. And I've seen that in
my own lifetime. So my father, he was born in 1925 and when he
was growing up, blue was the more was the more feminine
color, and pink was the more masculine color. And he and his
partner, Gilly, they had kind of essentially matching walking
sticks. One was blue and one was pink, and my dad's one was the
pink one, and Gilly's one was the blue one. And that seemed
entirely natural and normal to them. And I find it really funny
that in just in a relatively short period of time, in just
100 years in the span of one life, that meaning and
understanding has completely switched around. And I think
it's really interesting to imagine, if we all grow up to
100, what color meanings would have completely shifted over in
our lifetime. Will green, you know, now, I think people think
people think of green as being like kind of a natural color,
and to do with nature, maybe that won't be the case in a
hundred years time. Maybe we'll think of something else. Or
maybe when we think of yellow, we won't immediately think of
sunshine, we'll think of something else. We just don't
know yet. And again, this is why I love the subject of color.
Jane: And honestly, at this point, if you like pink or blue
or green or yellow or whatever color you can like whatever
color you want!
Kassia St. Clair: Absolutely. Colors are for everyone. And
these meanings that we attach to them, that sometimes seem so
rigid and like rules, they are going to change. They do change.
We can see them changing. And so even if something seems like a
really hard and fast rule, something that definitely should
be obeyed, just remember the example of pink and blue. They
feel a certain way now, but that wasn't always the case, and it
may not always be the case in the future. Who knows? In ten
years time, twenty years time, this may have all changed.
Jane: Thanks to Kassia St. Clair, author of The Secret
Lives of Color, for helping us think about the universe of
color and how much it's tied to the way we think about the world
around us. Do you have a favorite color? We'd love to
know and how that color makes you feel. Send us a video, and
we'll pop it up on our Instagram and YouTube pages. As always, if
you have a question about anything, have an adult record.
You asking it on a smartphone using an app like voice memos,
then have your adult email the file to
questions@butwhykids.org. Our show is produced by Melody
Bodette, Sarah Baik and me, Jane Lindholm at Vermont Public and
distributed by PRX. Our video producer is Joey Palumbo, and
our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. If you like our show,
please have your adults help you give us a thumbs up or a review
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families find us. We'll be back in two weeks with an all new
episode. Until then, stay curious!