Spectrophotometry gives us a shared language of color that facilitates color quality control in an international marketplace. Image Source: Flickr user Håkan Dahlström
Do you see color the way I see color?
The answer may very well be no. Our perception of color is influenced by a wide variety of factors, from viewing conditions to our biological make-up to our culture of origin, creating significant challenges to ensuring accurate color production based on our sight alone. In an increasingly diverse and multicultural marketplace, it is vital that we establish a common color language that is impervious to differences culture, linguistics, and biology. Spectrophotometry offers us a stable, objective method for discussing and evaluating color across cultural, linguistic, and biological lines.
Linguistic Production of Color Perception
Language is utilitarian. Cultures invent words based on their needs and environments, which is why Hawaiians have 65 words for sugarcane and everyone on the internet knows what “selfie”, a word that did not exist fifteen years ago, means. But as much as we shape language, language also shapes us. Researcher Jules Davidoff sought to investigate the relationship between language and color perception by traveling to Namibia to studying the Himba tribe.1 The tribe’s language does not include a word for “blue” and makes no linguistic distinction between blue and green. His findings were fascinating:
When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they could not pick out which one was different from the others — or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square.
In cultures with a wide range of words for green, variations are more likely to be noticed. Image Source: Flickr user Dave Morris
However, while the Himba tribe members have no word for blue, their language does have many more words for variations of green than English does. When shown a circle of 11 green squares with one square containing a nearly imperceptibly different shade of green, the Himba tribe members could instantly pick out the difference. Distinguishing between green hues was a natural part of their culture, as indicated by the availability of nuanced language to describe green variations. The difference registered immediately because it was culturally legible. At the same time, “without a word for a color, without a way of identifying it as different, it is much harder for us to notice what is unique about it — even though our eyes are physically seeing the [squares] it in the same way.” While the Himba tribe may be an extreme example, linguistic differences across cultures can create subtle but meaningful variation in how people from different places perceive color.
