Colour is not driven by fashion directly. There is always a technical innovation or regulatory change.
The Ford Focus pioneered a new 'silver' paint that was formulated differently to 'silver' paints that had gone on before. 'Silver' was no longer an expensive option, the base model had it. This proved popular and the trend was set, silver cars took over at the start of the century, using the new formula paint.
An example of regulatory change is food. In the 70's food coloring additives packed a vibrant punch. Decades later with many regulatory changes, those hot pink biscuits are now pinky grey. The palette has been toned down.
Although we have came a long way, many colours rely on elements that are quite toxic. We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt? Take those out on the same basis and things get grey.
Conversely, some trends in color are driven by overt, coordinated planning. Behold The Color Marketing Group [1]. According to their site, they meet "at local and international color forecasting events to interpret, create, forecast, and select colors with the goal of enhancing manufactured goods and services."
Here's some of the dreamlike prose with which they describe their attempt to capture the zeitgeist with a particular shade of blue [2]:
"Transition, evolution, and moving forward will continue to define the world and its population as 2022 emerges. Questions of trust and truth have been debated with many answered, but still more to come. Color Marketing Group’s North America 2022 Key Color, New Day, is the color response for a time still in transition.
"New Day suggests confidence and familiarity to greet 2022 with a sense of comfort. A light, fresh blue with red influences, New Day is an inspiring color designed to convey the classic connotation of hope and new beginnings.
"Whether a phone cover, hairdryer, or polo shirt, fashion and personal items are set to embrace New Day as a color equalizer. New Day presents a color that is not only new but suggests familiarity and ease. Genderless and ageless, it is a hue to blend with others, as well as allowing it to stand on its own."
> We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt?
Last time I brought an oil palette and looked at the paints composition, the most toxic thing I could find was copper. And it was as colorful as any oil palette.
You have piqued my interest, oil paints are going to be made safe for schools and I now want to know how they formulate all the colours.
From what I understand you can get many things out of crude oil but you can't just rearrange a few hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms to get any colour in the sRGB colour space. So what is the science of safe paints? Got to know now.
I don't know all the details, some were pretty hidden. I just looked because I saw a "non-toxic" label and doubted it.
I remember the dies that I could understand are mostly organic (and thus, may have a limited lifetime). There were many that I gave-up understanding the composition.
Anyway, I brought those in 2013. Things may have improved.
It's not just colours. The world rapidly turning into a real-life "borg-world": same kinds of buildings; same kinds of dresses; same kinds of "world models; same philosophies; and now the same language too.
The world is for all real purposes has been gobbled up by the Anglosphere.
It's all but dead; I'm sure many people realize how drab and low-entropy our world is today.
I live in an apartment that's about a century old, the style of which was widely (but not universally) replicated all over the industrialised world around that time. The view out tall my office window has some other apartment towers in a different and more recent style, perhaps 50 years old, and some short ones in yet another style that might be less than 10 years old.
I suspect that if everything looks the same to you, what you're seeing is the last time a place had major economic growth leading to a building boom.
When it comes to world models, I've met an anarcho-capitalist and an anarcho-communist, and I've known someone who thinks the best thing about democracy is preventing(!) people from getting what they want, and multiple people who want to end technological growth to let the ecosystem (they use the word "planet") heal, and at least one other who would gladly disassemble the actual planet to build a swarm of O'Neill cylinders to power a colonising swarm of von Neumann replicators to do the same to every star in our future light cone. My mother had anecdotes about relatives causing scandals by marrying outside their denominations of Christianity, I've known at the least atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, at least one literal Satanist, and Wiccans (and probably some more but it hasn't come up in conversation).
My impression is that architecture is becoming increasingly 'rectangular', with exteriors being basically a supremely boring assortment of different rectangular structures. Especially at the lower end, residential construction mainly meant to be sold to people who buy it as an investment rather than for personal use.
It's far easier and faster to use essentially pre-made easily-tileable templates for buildings than it is to make anything custom. A huge chunk of the US is built this way.
It's because those who need the buildings want them cheaply, and aren't considering an aesthetic factor.
When I first moved to Thailand, it seemed to me the colors were much more vibrant here than in Northern Europe. And even after living here for 5 years now, I still appreciate this often. Greens are more green, blues are more blue, etc...
I'm guessing it has to do with the position of the sun relative to the earth / how sunlight enters the earths atmosphere.
Just seeing these more vibrant colors have the effect of lifting my mood a bit.
Just last week I heard somewhere that colors in New Zealand are very vibrant as well. I've never been there, so not sure how it compares to Thailand, but perhaps it's true.
Having visited East Germany before the wall came down, I assure you some parts of the world used to be far more drab than anywhere today. Even North Korea seems to like pastels.
It's also rather Anglocentric to assume that the "generic world" you describe is an "Anglosphere". Today's modern aesthetic is often described as Japanese/Zen or Scandinavian, and indeed, its biggest purveyors -- IKEA, Muji, Uniqlo, H&M -- are not from the Anglosphere.
Growing up my family and I would look at new developments on the edge of town and lament that all the cookie-cutter houses looked the same.
I did a self-build on a house in 2021 and the county planners insisted I had to make the house blend in with the existing ones. There was no room for creativity.
For an age we're we've made progress in personal freedoms we seem pretty hell-bent on forcing conformity.
Maybe because we have such rich color reproduction in screens we feel the need to have the rest of our surroundings take on a more neutral stance. In fact this reflects the screens such as they are "blank canvases" that take on whatever content deemed fit for the present purpose or mood.
It is difficult to use a lot of color and be 'tasteful' it is a lot easier to use neutral colors even if the end result is dull. People are too afraid of being tacky so they stay in the nordic ikea safe zone.
There is also a risk aversion in buying a monitor which does not have a colored frame, and I think these two notions are related. I personally prefer white walls because I anticipate that I will one day re-style my home according to a new taste. I agree that there is a sense of fear involved, but it is not necessarily about the taste itself so much as the ambulating preference, which perhaps is tacky on another level.
> Consider this study, which analysed the colour of everyday objects over time.
> Percentage of Pixels across all photos
Does anybody have a citation for "this study" ?
It's implicitly implied that it comes from some mega cloud storage of personal and professional photos, but it'd be nice to see the actual source and read the methodoloy.
> This article analyses a selection of the Science Museum Group Collection. We examined over 7,000 photographs of objects from 21 categories. The categories were selected on the basis that they contained large numbers of everyday or familiar objects. These categories range from photographic technology to time measurement, lighting to printing and writing, and domestic appliances to navigation.
I was wondering the same thing, especially since the x-axis (time) goes all the way back to the year 1800. The oldest surviving photograph is from 1826 according to Wikipedia.
I distrust the study itself, but I have zero misgivings in the results. We bought a house a couple years ago. I personally looked through several thousand listings over the course of a few months (across the country). The standard house is painted tones of "realtor gray" with equivalent (Scandinavian modern) furniture that is dutifully de-saturated of all color more challenging than industrial pine.
Car colours is something that sometimes worries me, brighter colours are sold as 'extra', while greys are default/cheaper. This leads to some cars basically camouflaging with the road, especially at times like dawn or dusk. There are other colours that make it harder to spot a car depending on location/time-of-day, but from my experience greys and grey-navy-ish are the worst.
Brighter more easily spotted colors, superstitiously, are supposedly more likely to get someone stopped for common minor traffic infractions.
Have to also add; if self-driving cars saved everyone from gawker blocks and other annoyances that'd be a net gain for nearly never driving again, at least in more highly regulated areas (presumably interstates and highways first).
It's not an urban legend or superstition. It's a function of the lizard brain. It adds an extra "interesting" attribute (many things can do this, color is not the only one) that makes you more likely to get stopped. It's the same reason fishing lures are painted brighter than the natural colors of the things they are trying to emulate. It makes the brain go "hey what's that?". In both cases the object cannot trigger the "prey" workflow if the brain doesn't notice it.
Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white.
(I read somewhere [so take this with a grain of salt] that this effect happens with marble kitchen countertops: not that many homeowners actually like them, but they believe that potential buyers might, so an overproportional amount of people put them in their kitchens - leading everybody else to believe that they're actually very popular.)
As somebody who has recently renovated their kitchen and bathroom, it's not that I thought potential buyers would prefer white over a colour, it's just that I thought they were less likely to NOT like white over my preference of colour, and then either be put off, or feel like "this house is perfect but we'd have to redo the bathroom right away because I can't stand the pink" and then offer less.
When I redo a room it gets the colours we like. I don't care about the next owner of the house beyond keeping the house well maintained and gradually improving things like insulation and wiring. Don't like a colour? Change it after the sale.
As it is, the housing market in the Netherlands is completely overheated (seller's market due to a housing shortage), so I could paint every room hot pink and it won't affect the price one bit, but even when that settles down I won't choose boring colours just to push up the price a few thousand Euro.
My kitchen: red walls matched with off white cabinets and shelving; living room: bespoke teal wall filling book case matched with patterned wallpaper (in grays) and an oxblood red sofa and seat (a complimentary colour to the teal); and so on.
I have to live in it and maximizing the joy I get from my house is important to me.
If I were to renovate in a style which doesn't appeal to me, but has broader market appeal, it's still for me. The only difference is that I value the long term potential future income more than I value the loss of short term adherence to my taste.
> Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white.
There's definitely location/cultural variety here, people would worry a white car wouldn't sell, due to the increased visibility of dirt and scratches, so only gets 5% of sales here. The top colours here are silver (24%), black (22%) and blue (17%, mostly darker shades).
I'm not sure why silver cars escape the stigma of white cars here since they have the same issues, but they do.
After the size of vehicles and number of pickups, the amount of white cars was the next thing that stood out to me about the cars when I first went to california
> I'm not sure why silver cars escape the stigma of white cars here since they have the same issues, but they do.
Most cars ads show off new models in some variation of metalic grey. Perhaps this creates a subliminal impression in how people perceive metalic grey as an 'elegant' car colour.
Over here, it feels like white has become a much more common car color over the past 5(?) years or so. It used to be almost non-existent outside things like rental cars etc. but nowadays it's really common.
As for showing dirt/scratches/dents, from what I've read black is the worst actually, followed by other very dark colors. Best is relatively light gray, brownish/beige kind of colors.
My current car is bright-yellow. People often ask me whether the color selection was an error, or something went wrong during the order process or whatever.
They are really confused and in disbelief when I tell them that no, it was intentional.
The advantage (other than me just liking fancier colors and disliking the prevalence of grey in cars) is that I can find my car in even the largest parking lot from very far away, and that people instantly recognize me as it's seemingly the only yellow Mercedes-Benz in the town where I live (~100.000 inhabitants) ;-)
Recently I overheard two kids (a boy and a girl, around 7 or so) who drove by my car on bicycles, loudly proclaiming "I would never drive a yellow Mercedes". I wanted to ask them why, but they were too quick (and probably embarassed that I overheard them). I would really love to know if it was their own (genuuine) dislike of the color yellow, or if it was something they acquired from their parents or something like that.
To choose both a bright color and a luxury make is signaling to people that you want them to notice your fancier than average car. They are responding to this perceived flaunting of wealth.
To give you my personal opinion, yellow clashes with the elegant and sleek style of the brand Mercedes is trying to present. When I see a yellow car, I either think 'cheap run down taxi' or 'high end sports car', it doesn't fit with the mid range semi-luxury vehicles aesthetically. I guess it's because what we're culturally accustomed to.
Maybe this is why the Instagram article was a bit weird yesterday?
"On Tuesday morning, Instagram head Adam Mosseri appeared in full damage control mode. Facing the camera and wearing a bright yellow sweater, he attempted to quash a growing revolt from some of Instagram’s most prominent users."
There are people who can see with but only effort. Screen readers will allow them to browse quickly without becoming exhausted. For example, only being able to see when they have their eyes almost touching the screen.
I understand the objection to the general "why write X when I can see X" point. Obviously not everyone who can read some text can also watch a video.
In this specific case though, is conveying the color of the sweater to people who can't or don't watch the video important? Why mention the color of his sweater, but not the color of his eyes, his hairstyle, or any of countless other unrelated visual details?
Trying to put myself in the shoes of someone using a screen reader, maybe these little details give some extra context which, while irrelevant to the topic, help to give "color" to the story which I, as a person who is able to watch the video, am taking for granted?
The headline graphic is from https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... which really tells us about the colour of a subset of objects in the Science Museum's collection – so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials.
There does seem to be maybe 20% more neutral-coloured cars since 1990, though. Interior design is probably the thing I'd most readily say has become more muted in my lifetime. I guess I'd say the world has become less saturated rather than less colourful.
Just came here to agree—It seems to me that both colors and the shapes are converging. Way too much similarity for my taste.
Also, in the same way US legislation killed the station wagon and created the SUV, the latest CAFE standards are creating many boring to drive automobiles.
> so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials
Yes, the wood telegraph in the article is a good example of this. Because of wood’s texture, it contains a bunch of colors from red to yellow when you look at it at the pixel level. It’s more colorful than an iPhone, but the variety of pixels alone gives the impression that it’s more colorful than it is.
reminded me immediately of a tweet about the recent season of Dexter (https://twitter.com/_katiestebbins_/status/14613483079013785...). When new TV shows air I can't avoid paying attention to colors now, this kind of 'Scandi-Noir' look for a lack of a better term has become super common.
At least it's not orange-and-teal. Presumably scandi-noir will in turn give way to a different colour fashion in another few years (retro '80s neon?), and we'll be able to get nostalgic for subtle understated lighting and color grading.
I would argue the graph looking at pixels in photographs is probably more affected by smartphones than any societal trend.
Because so many more pictures are taken with smartphones now, the colors produced by smartphones have an impact here.
But probably a greater impact is the number of throw-away pictures that are taken and published now as opposed to before.
(Not to say that smartphones pictures are bad pictures, but to say that ease of taking pictures, and ease of publishing pictures, removes bariers to 'bad' pictures. Smartphones are probably also responsible for an absolute increase in the total number of good pictures)
The graph describes the colours in pictures taken of objects that are part a museum’s collection, not pictures taken with a variety of cameras over time. The behaviour of smartphone cameras would have no effect.
Sunlight, candle-light and resistive filament lights (incandescent)
have a broadband spectrum. Through most of history we've viewed the
world lit by these sources.
Moving to fluorescent lights causes spectral quantisation as the
frequencies are due to electronic band transitions in the gas. The
phosphor absorbs and re-emits energy in different bands that fills out
the spectrum but it's still really strange, with missing bits. When
fluorescent lights first became popular people complained of headaches
from the strange spectrum. They are disfavoured in certain industrial
applications because they make some colours harder to see.
Semiconductor lighting is even worse in this regard. Radiative
re-emission in valance holes emits line spectrums. Only by combining
these do we trick the eye into seeing "white light". Recently we've
got good at blending doping agents to give mixed spectrums that
approximate daylight.
If these forms of electronic lighting have holes in their spectra,
perhaps that's why an analysis of a corpus of photos shows a change in
spectrum over time?
I have real problem with colour-perception in LED lighting - board game evenings are tricky when I can't tell the piece colours apart so well. Feels like it's just me though...
A couple weeks ago, I had the chance to play board games by candlelight. I was in a cabin in the woods.
And trust me, it would be much better with LEDs though obviously not perfect. Sometimes the colors just aren't different enough to easily tell apart. It seems like an issue that should be fixed.
Exactly, if you get nice CRI 95 lamps you are unlikely to have a noticeable problem with color rendition.
But still beware, the CRI printed on the box (Ra) is kind of flawed since it is measured on unsaturated colors and does not include information about color renditions of red objects. You would have to look at the R9 value as well.
Not always, many are RGBW since the sole white LED consumes less power than the RGB LEDs shining together to produce white (I believe so at least) and the white color coming off the single white LED is nicer than the mixed color.
This is terrible for people with glasses btw -- induces much more chromatic aberration than other light sources, and is very distracting and hard to ignore. At the edges of the field of view objects get very clearly separated, with the blue part usually being the most noticeable.
Are you talking about single-colour LEDs? Since white LEDs use a "phosphor", just like fluorescent lights, that convert blue or UV light. In fact I thought that the phosphors used by LEDs today are much better than those used by fluorescent lights.
Maybe you're talking about RGB lights, which combine separate reg, green and blue LEDs so that the colour mix can be changed. But even then I thought, unlike lasers, LEDs are not using single frequencies but relatively wide bands (but will still leave gaps between the red, green and blue colours).
> white LEDs use a "phosphor", just like fluorescent lights
Wow. I didn't know that. So I guess the junction actually emits UV
which is converted to visible spectrum? Does that mean they're bad for
your eyes if some UV leaks out?
How I thought it worked is that different doping materials are blended
in the junction to get a mix of frequencies. Maybe that's impossible.
And yes, sure for RGB clusters the spacing is obvious even to my eyes.
As far as I can see from distributors, most white LEDs today are using a blue light emitter, so there's no issue with UV. When using white LEDs that use an UV emitter, some glass covering is needed to catch the remainder, from what I've heard from a friend (I've never actually built an LED lamp myself). But it appears that blue LEDs are much more efficient than UV ones and that probably explains why normally white LEDs use blue emitters.
PS. I've been looking into these things to some extent because of all the issues with commercial LED lamps (short life, AC or PWM flickering, colour rendering), and have been thinking of mixing more LEDs together (various single colour ones together with various phosphor-employing ones) so as to mix a more ideal spectrum myself, but I haven't gotten around to actually executing that plan.
For normal lighting LEDs the diode itself usually emits blue light (440-460 nm). Most of the blue photons are then absorbed by the phosphor or phosphors and reemitted at longer wavelengths (yellow-green to red). This converted light mixed with the remaining blue light gives the white color impression.
So no UV, although there are some concerns about the hazards of blue light. But if you ask me, you get much more blue light onto your retinas by just going outside on a sunny day than you'd ever get from normal LED lighting.
I still find it fascinating how confidently people are willing to put out comments with all sorts of strongly worded claims about things they are not knowledgeable on, that turn out to completely wrong.
> I still find it fascinating how confidently people are willing to
put out comments with all sorts of strongly worded claims about
things they are not knowledgeable on, that turn out to completely
wrong.
On the other hand I find it terrifying how many people will spend
their lives cowering in quiet ignorance never venturing anything, and
never learning anything, all for the fear of looking foolish.
This seems like it would be pretty testable. We still take a lot of photos under sunlight. If light sources are the cause, then the effect should disappear if we look only at such photos.
As others have pointed out, LED lights for general lighting (not those RGB strips for accent lighting) use phosphors with very broad emission bands. Unlike fluorescent lamps, they don't have big gaps in the spectrum. Just a dip in the cyan region.
Just make sure to buy stuff with high CRI, preferably 90 or more, and you'll be fine.
There is a famous if possibly apocryphal study where random people were asked to rate various toaster colors, and everybody swooned over lime green and hot pink and whatnot.
After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.
The reason for that seems obvious to me. Grey, steel, white and black will work in basically every kitchen. If you want a more colorful pallet in any room in your house, then you need to put a lot more thought into planning it. I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that.
That seems unlikely. Look at fashion and decor magazines from the past and you see lots of lively colours that are coordinated. If you go house hunting and see a couple houses that haven’t been updated for decades they have a definite palette.
Magazines are a reflection of a narrow slice of reality, usually the slice that could afford to buy the stuff advertised in magazines. Anyone can buy a magazine and aspire to the lifestyles depicted, but most can only aspire.
I think this is part of it. I don't think people (in real life, not in magazines) cared as much whether something "went with" the rest of the room. Like, I'm sure some people did, but it wasn't a normal thing for middle class folks to care much about, as far as trying to make their own house look that way.
There's, relatedly, probably some effect from all those home makeover & house-buying shows, which constantly push "any 'weird' color is bad, and any room without great color coordination is bad, and it's not OK not to mind it". There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch about this, in which two home-buyers on such a show are presented a bathroom with avocado fixtures, and the host berates them over multiple takes because their initial reaction isn't as negative as it ought to be. Fiction, but there's definitely a kind of same-ness to people's reactions to any but a few acceptable colors on those shows.
Seems like a stretch that using screens has led to a decline in interior decorating. You could argue a whole generation including men are now devolved into desk setups, plants, terrariums, "earthy colors", hygge, woodworking, aesthetics, etc through Pinterest, Instagram, etc. The same revolution has happened for the glorification of cooks -> chefs and the proliferation of home bakers
Alternatively, people in the past had fewer possesions (not out of virtuous minimialism as some people portray, but sheer economic reality), and so had more time to consider how each would fit in.
They're talking about a design perspective. People like the lime green toaster because it by itself looks nice, but if they placed it in _their_ kitchen, it would probably look absolutely ridiculous unless they're designers and know how to perfectly balance such a strong color in the room.
In contrast, neutral colors will look good in any color palette and require zero design talent from your side.
We're talking about the context of this "study". If people are asked which toaster they want to take home, the vast majority of them will have a kitchen where "grey, steel, white or black" works the best, even if they prefer another color. They're not going to redesign their entire kitchen for a particular toaster.
palate / palette / pallet
Your “palate” is the roof of your mouth, and by extension, your sense of taste. A “palette” is the flat board an artist mixes paint on (or by extension, a range of colors). A “pallet” is either a bed (now rare) or a flat platform onto which goods are loaded.
Stainless steel as darker than that, and typically "brushed". That's chrome.
In any case, many people might have a vague idea that stainless steel is more durable, but not be able to tell the difference between stainless steel, chrome painted hard plastic, or galvanized steel. I wonder if the study accounted for that.
Somebody actually flag-killed you for saying stainless steel wasn't a color.
I think you're making a really good point. If there was an obvious durability difference between toasters (plastic vs. stainless steel), I'd take the steel one even if I liked the cherry red one better. If the red one I preferred were also steel, then that would be the question this experiment intends to examine (I'd be choosing on color.)
Colorful shit is often cheap shit.
edit: You can get plastic stuff "stainless steel color" by plating it with a thin foil, but then I'm definitely going for one of the colorful, dyed plastics, because that stuff is going to flake off.
They obviously mean "natural" stainless steel finish.
The name of the color would be silver, but silver color is a wider range of colors, silver is also confusingly just the name of a metal which it is not, and also would include "silver paint on top of stainless steel".
If you want to be pedantic, there is no such thing as a "color". There are light waves with a frequency that hit a highly non-linear detector (our eye) and what comes from that is analyzed by your brain to put a label such as "red".
What you see is different from what I see (not to mention that I am a daltonist) - and none of these are standardized.
We are used to colors and this is why we label them.
So "chrome" is absolutely a color, like "salmon" and "fuschia" is, or "gold" or "brownish"
I'm referring to a "color" in the product customization sense of the word.
You could buy a red toaster or a blue toaster, and you'd have every reason to think that it's different paint or dyes, but an otherwise equivalent product made of the same underlying materials.
Whereas stainless steel partly refers to a small range of colors, but mainly to the properties of the material.
In the context of kitchen appliances stainless steel products are almost always of higher quality and durability.
As an example: You can find stainless steel fridges, and cheap fridges, but no cheap stainless steel fridges.
If you were offering me a red or stainless steel fridge sight unseen I'd always go for the stainless one, even if I much preferred red to stainless as a look.
I could always glue a red MDF panel to the door, but the advantages of "stainless" would extend to other premium aspects of the fridge.
> Red–green color blindness: This form of colorblindness is sometimes referred to as daltonism after John Dalton, who had red-green dichromacy. In some languages, daltonism is still used to describe red-green color blindness.
From the search results that popped up, the word "daltonist" seems to be used in Romanian, Serbian, and Bosnian languages.
One could argue that those are two different questions. E.g. what would look nice on itself vs what would look good in your kitchen or might be more timeless
If I had to guess it was short term vs long term color preference, and focus preference.
Lime green is nice when it is short lived, but lime green isn't as nice in year 25, after your tastes have changed.
Hot pink is very eye catching, so it got the votes. On the other hand hot pink is very eye catching, who wants their toaster to be the center of attention?
I remember reading a feature/native advertisement about Lenovo's ThinkPad focus groups a while back (I think on Ars or The Verge) that had a similar conclusion.
People would go crazy over a red or white ThinkPad in focus groups, but would never buy one because they couldn't see themselves as "that person" with the red laptop at a meeting.
Lenovo did make both a red and white x100e a long while ago, but those were more like netbooks.
Then it's fatter and heavier and I may as well have gotten the 14" Pro. Macs aren't like iPhones that constantly fall out of your pocket and need the extra padding.
That's really interesting to read about (and the comment above); I hope that the people running these things know this is a thing too.
It adds up too. Companies like Apple have long advertised with a diverse range of colors for their devices, but I think most people settle on black / white in the end because it's more neutral / doesn't stand out.
At some point people had trouble distinguishing their grey macbook pro from the hundred other macbook pros. First that was resolved with full size sticker and covers (which were cute in that they used the illuminated apple logo on the back as a feature), then with... a very wild and colorful range of stickers they save up from conferences and the like.
It was an interesting thing to witness, having big groups of people with bland, uniform, sleek and neutral, to a very nerdy form of self-expression and standing out from the crowd.
Quick check on Volkswagen site tells me that changing default silver to red on new Polo increases the price by about $656. That's just about the minimal wage where I live.
Fantastic. One thing that can be added is that since 2021, everything became 50 shades of purple.
And I mean annoyingly forced things that should never be that color.
Example: the other day I saw some youtube video of upcoming videogames and many of them have, somehow, parts of purple smoke in fire explosions, the engine exhaust of the Millenium Falcon going from its classic light blue to purplish, lights and shadows that do not match the natural environment forced to subtle purplish.
Not to mention the mandatory login screen of macOS Monterrey.
It's interesting to think about examples where we've been moving to a better world, or more rational choices based on these seemingly more boring color selections, or where external factors are driving them:
1. White as a car color is much more practical in any place that gets a lot of direct sun. In e.g. South Africa you might drive around all day and not see anything except white cars. In Western and Southern Europe their popularity is a rough approximation of summer heat and sunlight in the area.
2. These photographs are by-and-large leaving ignoring practicalities. Sure, a natural wooden wall is nice, but it also needs more maintenance to look like that than one that's painted white.
3. For kitchens boring colors are practically synonymous with an increase in durability and the ability to withstand water. It's easy to get stainless steel, or a white and black marble countertop, you can't paint stainless steel and still place a hot pan on it, a wooden countertop is going to be subject to rot over time, particularly with water ingress. Once you pick stainless steel or white/black for major surfaces others tend to follow.
You ignore one more thing: white cars are popular because they are often the cheapest. You need to pay more for most color options -> so in poor countries people choose the cheapest model (white paint can be useful in a desert, but in most environments it is harder to clean). Even "boring" colors like silver or black can require an additional fee.
Companies often choose white cars as well for their fleets: you can easily put a big company logo on a white car - and it will probably look good.
I bet lots of people would choose different colors, if this didnt require to pay additional 1000-2000 dollars. (Also again practicality comes to mind: if you buy a car in an uncommon color you will have problems to get spare parts). This additional fee might be not much for a software developer from Silicon Valley who earns 300k per year, but is a big thing for most of the world.
As far as I know, when you want a non-standard color, for many cars it is cheaper to partially disassemble the body and wrap it in those plastic stickers than to ask the factory to paint it (not to mention that it will take few months before you get your car delivered, why you probably want it now). Only a small section of people does this though.
I bet if the prices of uncommon colors were lower, one could see much more unusual cars.
In fact in some ways the manufacturers are the ones who set the palette (probably based on market research), some colors come in unusual colors straight from the factory. So you 'have' to choose the fancy color, since the car does not come in boring ones. Or at least the unusual color is cheaper (few hundred dollars -> still a lot for many people). For example every now and often a manufacturer comes out with some variant of orange, or orange-red: https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2021/12/orange-cars-you-...
In many ways car color is an illusion of choice: if you dont want to pay 2k dollars and wait few months, you have to take one of the boring colors that are available on the lot for you -> and those 'boring' were selected by the manufacturers, since their market research showed that they will sell. Tons of people cant afford to pay more to have a car that looks different. But judging by the amount of stickers you see on cars, perhaps they would.
Dealership economics also play a big part, at least in the US. If the dealership stocks cars in bright colors, some people will love it, and others will hate it, so selling the car will be hit or miss. If they get lucky they can use the color as a selling point, if they aren't they get stuck with a difficult to sell car at the end of the year. On they other hand, if they stock neutral colors like white, people may not love the color but they won't hate it either - it will rarely make/break a sale.
Of course customers can order customized cars, but the dealership will always prefer to sell the stock that they have on hand. So while special ordering a colorful car might be only slightly more expensive than special ordering a white car, special ordering anything for any reason will loose you all negotiating power and cost you thousands of dollars in the final price. I might want a colorful car, but I don't want to pay that much more for a colorful car, so I settle for white.
Another explanation would be rising car sales in Middle East, Africa and other economically developing regions with very hot climate where white colored cars are simply more economical as they don't heat as much in the sun.
If you are like me and love vibrant colours and struggle to understand the postmodern(?) obsession with drab palettes, I recommend the book Chromophobia by David Batchelor [1]. It contextualizes this phenomenon within broader western art history and is just generally super interesting to someone who has an interest in art and design but isn't embedded in that world. The main takeaway, iirc, is that this isn't a particularly new thing.
I've bought a few colorful items recently, 80's print clothing and a rainbow rhinocerous from Amazon (this for reference, because it's awesome: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DT5NMB5?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...) and it is strange how transgressive it feels.
The study of colors seems to neglect that back before taking photos were ubiquitous, photographers would have a higher likelihood of taking photos of colorful, more interesting things (why waste a photo on something boring?)
Regarding cars however, this is likely due to costs of colorful paint as scale.
I've been commenting over the past year or two on the color of new cars recently. It seems "security contractor grey" of various shades is all the rage the past few years.
My pet theory is that car colors tend to reflect society's mood, and we've been in a dour one for some time.
Monopolies and the one size fits all mentality. The world has become more globalist and centralized and this is just one of the symptoms. I blame the central planners.
I'm a man and I like colors. I have a red car, red shoes and colorful jackets. None of them are especially remarkable, they just have colors on them. I get remarks from colleagues about my shoes, I get remarks from random people on the street about my jacket. These people don't tend to be very positive about it, yet they feel the need to say something about my appearance, because I wear colorful stuff.
I feel like part of the movement towards grayscale is that people are afraid to stand out. I can always easily find my car in a parking lot, because it stands out. People can find me in a group, because I stand out. I'm glad I don't care too much about the opinions of other people, so I just wear what I want to and don't try to blend in. I also feel bad for people who don't wear what they'd like to because they're afraid to stand out, because you only get one lifetime.
I personally also hate that the already dreadful winter is made even more dreadful by everyone wearing dark clothing. Please all buy something colorful to wear next winter... It's safer too!
I almost always wear hi-vis orange shirts, and my preferred hoodie is hi-vis yellow (pity it’s not orange, but that’s the one I’ve got and I don’t need another). Good quality, readily available, comfortable, cheap, and I stand out and am memorable in most contexts, which can be useful. Probably blinds people a little in direct sunlight, though no one’s ever mentioned such a thing. Occasionally throws people for a loop because they assume I must be some kind of tradie.
I started this back in 2010 as a safety measure when cycling from home to Uni, and rapidly decided I liked it.
I’ve progressively branded myself more and more in bright orange. Funny thing is it isn’t even close to my favourite colour.
My car is “velocity red”. Pity it’s not metallic orange or green or some other more interesting colour, but I certainly don’t care enough to foot the bill to repaint it.
If you're actually interested in changing your car color, you should could look at wrapping. It's still expensive (thousands last I checked, which was before any measurable inflation took hold), but cheaper than painting and obviously less permanent. I've heard it's better to wrap black/dark vehicles because if the measurement and cuts are a bit off it gets hidden away a lot better than something like red or blue. But could still be an option!
I had a dark gray car many years ago that I wanted to wrap in matte black, but I just never got around to it then ended up selling it.
> I almost always wear hi-vis orange shirts, and my preferred hoodie is hi-vis yellow
I have some orange t-shirts that I love, but if I'm going out on a trip to the country to look for wildlife there is no way I'd wear them - I choose muted natural greens and khaki instead (although I don't actually wear camo gear). Also, when I photographing anywhere where I might be partially visible in a window reflection I wear clothes that don't have stripes, because these stand out like a sore thumb.
Does most of that wildlife have color perception that would pick out orange? My recollection is that hunters in Colorado would wear blaze-orange vests to reduce the chance of being shot by other hunters; I presumed that this did not make them conspicuous to deer or elk.
Many birds have very good colour vision, including UV. Some mammals such as Lions are dichromatic (lacking red) but this doesn’t render a red jacket invisible.
> These people don't tend to be very positive about it, yet they feel the need to say something about my appearance, because I wear colourful stuff.
That's odd, I dress in colourful clothes and I get positive comments both from people who are themselves dressed in bright colours and from people very drably dressed. Perhaps it differs from place to place.
> I'm glad I don't care too much about the opinions of other people
I think there is a small minority of people that either want attention, or don't mind it.
The rest of the world wants to avoid drawing attention to themselves. This is true for both positive and negative attention. I don't think it's so much about what others think, I think it's just that attention is uncomfortable for most people, and they do what they can to blend in as to avoid drawing attention and feeling uncomfortable.
If the world were more colorful, this may mean not wearing neutral colors, as this would now stand out and likely draw attention.
Jeff: "Is it me or are more people wearing gray? I feel like I'm in a commercial and someone's about to hand me a Starbust."
Abed: "3's and 2's tend to wear neutral colors. Looking like you want to move up can get you moved down..." [Abed waves to people in the distance] "Those are other 3's. We talk about how we're glad we're not 2's." [Abed stands to leave] "Small talk guys... I make small talk now."
Designers: We use gray colors as a starting point in value evaluation. This gives us the ability to see the form clearly.
Marketing: When presented with a colorful choice, people will buy the gray/white and neutral palette. We will create a colorful campaign to ignite emotional response.
Business Development: We love this approach. It makes business sense. Go for it.
Psychologist: In the past, people were open-minded and tolerated more artistic and individual choices. Nowadays, every one is in search of the safe zone for social validation and compliance. Big Brands create a culture of subtle colors and people love it.
> These people don't tend to be very positive about it, yet they feel the need to say something about my appearance, because I wear colorful stuff.
I'm a man and I've recently started wearing a lot of "Hawaiian" shirts (loud, colorful prints) and I get a lot of compliments on the street. Not sure if it's about the color or about wearing something that reads as a "party" shirt, though.
if you dress a way that you are not, people will get mad, and if you do, they are happy.
this thread wasn't talking about fashion choices anyway. the reason for this is totally uninteresting. we're seeing the circumstances of assets like cars and houses being sold to future people and surviving, and the ones that future people by have less of the prior owner's personality to them.
why are new houses so boxy and drab? consider that the brutalist VA building in Chicago and federal building in boston are equally as historically important, if not more so, than your average twee little crumbling victorian in san francisco. but hey, you can demolish the "ugly" buildings and critically, do something fuck all different with the land, than those absolutely destitute sticks buildings. i don't think the economic stories are interesting.
The absolute destitute sticks buildings stay up out of some perverse mixture of house-as-investment (instead of land-as-investment), American house building culture, the state of construction in this country, and a really misplaced desire for “historical” preservation of “neighborhood character”.
The Victorian houses are nice but they all need to go.
I don't know shit about San Francisco (which I assume you're talking about here), but I'm very glad that Baltimore isn't knocking down all of our 1890s brick-and-masonry rowhome shells to put up more 4+1 apartment complexes.
I do the same. I either have a flashy top, or a flashy bottom. And I love it, because it gives more occasions to get compliments. Not only people can comment about how the clothe fits, but also how the color highlights my skin (I'm pretty tanned all year round, and flashy colors makes it even more stand out).
But yeah, people are afraid of standing out. Once a friend told me he'd love to do the same, but he did not have the guts to do it, so he keeps wearing dim clothes.
I do the same. When people remarking about it are a bit malicious I always say: "I can afford to have X that way. I don't have to blend in or be careful what other people say about my choice of colours."
My pet peeve is cases like this where you mention the context of where you're from, but it's so broad as to be useless. There are places in the USA where it's popular to dye your hair bright colors and get tattoos, but I assure you there are also places in the USA where it is not. When mentioning being from the USA in the context of talking about USA culture, one should specify a state, metro area, or at least general region. The USA is a very diverse place, but since so many Americans rarely see the rest of it except through media (which naturally plays up the homogeneity or focuses on things that will be relatable throughout the USA, avoiding local quirks unless trying to emphasize a strange locality), they frequently mistakenly assume the whole country is a lot more similar to their region than it really is.
Do you have a place in mind where these things are not common? Like I have friends from Tennessee with colored hair, colored contacts, and like to wear bright "harajuku" style fashion.
but sure, I'm positive there's some towns where dressing in bright colors is frowned on. Not sure where that would be. Even Elvis and Roy Rogers wore outlandish clothing.
I'm guessing your Tennessee friends live in a city (or not even in TN at all, since you say they're "from" there).
In my experience there is much more conformity in rural areas in the mid-south, especially in middle class spaces. I even notice it if I take a flight from the east coast to Tulsa, Oklahoma. The first flight to a hub like Atlanta has a normal variety of people in a normal variety of dress. Then the second leg you suddenly notice a significant decrease in variety. It's just kind of obvious if you see it, so idk why you haven't noticed it unless you're not very well travelled in the USA.
It sounds like you are making inferences about Tennessee based on what your friends from there are like, but they are your friends (and it sounds like they chose to move from TN to wherever you are) so this is in many ways a biased sample. A more accurate way is to observe random people. I would be more interested in hearing your observations from when you actually visited Tennessee than your inferences you think you can make from knowing someone who is from there.
I happened to fly out of Austin, Texas, on Halloween late in the 1980s. An awful lot of the airport staff were done up for Halloween. I landed in Dallas-Fort Worth for a connecting flight home, and nobody but nobody was done up for Halloween.
I'm a guy, and I also like colors. But I tend to like low-lightness, high-saturation colors. Just because it's dark doesn't mean it's not colorful! I'm currently wearing a black & dark-blue Hawaiian-print shirt!
The quantitative results about "pixels" are, experimentally speaking, garbage. The do not prove the point even if it feels true. A more thorough analysis would be welcome, possibly with different geographical points. E.g. let's do that in Iran, Russia, Tanzania and a European country. Are there correlations with traditional culture? And with the current political system?
I myself have anecdotical accounts of this. It couples with decreasing personalization. Today even the desktop picture is seldom changed by the end user.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadThe Ford Focus pioneered a new 'silver' paint that was formulated differently to 'silver' paints that had gone on before. 'Silver' was no longer an expensive option, the base model had it. This proved popular and the trend was set, silver cars took over at the start of the century, using the new formula paint.
An example of regulatory change is food. In the 70's food coloring additives packed a vibrant punch. Decades later with many regulatory changes, those hot pink biscuits are now pinky grey. The palette has been toned down.
Although we have came a long way, many colours rely on elements that are quite toxic. We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt? Take those out on the same basis and things get grey.
Here's some of the dreamlike prose with which they describe their attempt to capture the zeitgeist with a particular shade of blue [2]:
"Transition, evolution, and moving forward will continue to define the world and its population as 2022 emerges. Questions of trust and truth have been debated with many answered, but still more to come. Color Marketing Group’s North America 2022 Key Color, New Day, is the color response for a time still in transition.
"New Day suggests confidence and familiarity to greet 2022 with a sense of comfort. A light, fresh blue with red influences, New Day is an inspiring color designed to convey the classic connotation of hope and new beginnings.
"Whether a phone cover, hairdryer, or polo shirt, fashion and personal items are set to embrace New Day as a color equalizer. New Day presents a color that is not only new but suggests familiarity and ease. Genderless and ageless, it is a hue to blend with others, as well as allowing it to stand on its own."
[1] https://colormarketing.org/about
[2] https://colormarketing.org/2020/11/20/key-color-new-day/
Last time I brought an oil palette and looked at the paints composition, the most toxic thing I could find was copper. And it was as colorful as any oil palette.
From what I understand you can get many things out of crude oil but you can't just rearrange a few hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms to get any colour in the sRGB colour space. So what is the science of safe paints? Got to know now.
I remember the dies that I could understand are mostly organic (and thus, may have a limited lifetime). There were many that I gave-up understanding the composition.
Anyway, I brought those in 2013. Things may have improved.
The world is for all real purposes has been gobbled up by the Anglosphere. It's all but dead; I'm sure many people realize how drab and low-entropy our world is today.
I live in an apartment that's about a century old, the style of which was widely (but not universally) replicated all over the industrialised world around that time. The view out tall my office window has some other apartment towers in a different and more recent style, perhaps 50 years old, and some short ones in yet another style that might be less than 10 years old.
I suspect that if everything looks the same to you, what you're seeing is the last time a place had major economic growth leading to a building boom.
When it comes to world models, I've met an anarcho-capitalist and an anarcho-communist, and I've known someone who thinks the best thing about democracy is preventing(!) people from getting what they want, and multiple people who want to end technological growth to let the ecosystem (they use the word "planet") heal, and at least one other who would gladly disassemble the actual planet to build a swarm of O'Neill cylinders to power a colonising swarm of von Neumann replicators to do the same to every star in our future light cone. My mother had anecdotes about relatives causing scandals by marrying outside their denominations of Christianity, I've known at the least atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, at least one literal Satanist, and Wiccans (and probably some more but it hasn't come up in conversation).
It's because those who need the buildings want them cheaply, and aren't considering an aesthetic factor.
I'm guessing it has to do with the position of the sun relative to the earth / how sunlight enters the earths atmosphere.
Just seeing these more vibrant colors have the effect of lifting my mood a bit.
Just last week I heard somewhere that colors in New Zealand are very vibrant as well. I've never been there, so not sure how it compares to Thailand, but perhaps it's true.
It's also rather Anglocentric to assume that the "generic world" you describe is an "Anglosphere". Today's modern aesthetic is often described as Japanese/Zen or Scandinavian, and indeed, its biggest purveyors -- IKEA, Muji, Uniqlo, H&M -- are not from the Anglosphere.
I did a self-build on a house in 2021 and the county planners insisted I had to make the house blend in with the existing ones. There was no room for creativity.
For an age we're we've made progress in personal freedoms we seem pretty hell-bent on forcing conformity.
It is difficult to use a lot of color and be 'tasteful' it is a lot easier to use neutral colors even if the end result is dull. People are too afraid of being tacky so they stay in the nordic ikea safe zone.
I hate it.
I'll take a 50s grandma's house any day over the cookie-cutter machined greyscale apartments I see everywhere today.
> Percentage of Pixels across all photos
Does anybody have a citation for "this study" ?
It's implicitly implied that it comes from some mega cloud storage of personal and professional photos, but it'd be nice to see the actual source and read the methodoloy.
ADDENDUM: Found it.
https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
> This article analyses a selection of the Science Museum Group Collection. We examined over 7,000 photographs of objects from 21 categories. The categories were selected on the basis that they contained large numbers of everyday or familiar objects. These categories range from photographic technology to time measurement, lighting to printing and writing, and domestic appliances to navigation.
Hmmmmm.
That site didn't look at clothes, furniture, and walls, that I imagine saw the largest changes.
Have to also add; if self-driving cars saved everyone from gawker blocks and other annoyances that'd be a net gain for nearly never driving again, at least in more highly regulated areas (presumably interstates and highways first).
Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white.
(I read somewhere [so take this with a grain of salt] that this effect happens with marble kitchen countertops: not that many homeowners actually like them, but they believe that potential buyers might, so an overproportional amount of people put them in their kitchens - leading everybody else to believe that they're actually very popular.)
As it is, the housing market in the Netherlands is completely overheated (seller's market due to a housing shortage), so I could paint every room hot pink and it won't affect the price one bit, but even when that settles down I won't choose boring colours just to push up the price a few thousand Euro.
My kitchen: red walls matched with off white cabinets and shelving; living room: bespoke teal wall filling book case matched with patterned wallpaper (in grays) and an oxblood red sofa and seat (a complimentary colour to the teal); and so on.
I have to live in it and maximizing the joy I get from my house is important to me.
If I were to renovate in a style which doesn't appeal to me, but has broader market appeal, it's still for me. The only difference is that I value the long term potential future income more than I value the loss of short term adherence to my taste.
There's definitely location/cultural variety here, people would worry a white car wouldn't sell, due to the increased visibility of dirt and scratches, so only gets 5% of sales here. The top colours here are silver (24%), black (22%) and blue (17%, mostly darker shades).
I'm not sure why silver cars escape the stigma of white cars here since they have the same issues, but they do.
After the size of vehicles and number of pickups, the amount of white cars was the next thing that stood out to me about the cars when I first went to california
Most cars ads show off new models in some variation of metalic grey. Perhaps this creates a subliminal impression in how people perceive metalic grey as an 'elegant' car colour.
As for showing dirt/scratches/dents, from what I've read black is the worst actually, followed by other very dark colors. Best is relatively light gray, brownish/beige kind of colors.
They are really confused and in disbelief when I tell them that no, it was intentional.
The advantage (other than me just liking fancier colors and disliking the prevalence of grey in cars) is that I can find my car in even the largest parking lot from very far away, and that people instantly recognize me as it's seemingly the only yellow Mercedes-Benz in the town where I live (~100.000 inhabitants) ;-)
Recently I overheard two kids (a boy and a girl, around 7 or so) who drove by my car on bicycles, loudly proclaiming "I would never drive a yellow Mercedes". I wanted to ask them why, but they were too quick (and probably embarassed that I overheard them). I would really love to know if it was their own (genuuine) dislike of the color yellow, or if it was something they acquired from their parents or something like that.
https://uploads.carandclassic.co.uk/uploads/cars/triumph/118...
"On Tuesday morning, Instagram head Adam Mosseri appeared in full damage control mode. Facing the camera and wearing a bright yellow sweater, he attempted to quash a growing revolt from some of Instagram’s most prominent users."
https://archive.ph/FF2d1
Why even mention the color of the sweater? I can see that clearly on the video.
In this specific case though, is conveying the color of the sweater to people who can't or don't watch the video important? Why mention the color of his sweater, but not the color of his eyes, his hairstyle, or any of countless other unrelated visual details?
Trying to put myself in the shoes of someone using a screen reader, maybe these little details give some extra context which, while irrelevant to the topic, help to give "color" to the story which I, as a person who is able to watch the video, am taking for granted?
The headline graphic is from https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... which really tells us about the colour of a subset of objects in the Science Museum's collection – so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials.
There does seem to be maybe 20% more neutral-coloured cars since 1990, though. Interior design is probably the thing I'd most readily say has become more muted in my lifetime. I guess I'd say the world has become less saturated rather than less colourful.
Also, in the same way US legislation killed the station wagon and created the SUV, the latest CAFE standards are creating many boring to drive automobiles.
Yes, the wood telegraph in the article is a good example of this. Because of wood’s texture, it contains a bunch of colors from red to yellow when you look at it at the pixel level. It’s more colorful than an iPhone, but the variety of pixels alone gives the impression that it’s more colorful than it is.
(Not to say that smartphones pictures are bad pictures, but to say that ease of taking pictures, and ease of publishing pictures, removes bariers to 'bad' pictures. Smartphones are probably also responsible for an absolute increase in the total number of good pictures)
Sunlight, candle-light and resistive filament lights (incandescent) have a broadband spectrum. Through most of history we've viewed the world lit by these sources.
Moving to fluorescent lights causes spectral quantisation as the frequencies are due to electronic band transitions in the gas. The phosphor absorbs and re-emits energy in different bands that fills out the spectrum but it's still really strange, with missing bits. When fluorescent lights first became popular people complained of headaches from the strange spectrum. They are disfavoured in certain industrial applications because they make some colours harder to see.
Semiconductor lighting is even worse in this regard. Radiative re-emission in valance holes emits line spectrums. Only by combining these do we trick the eye into seeing "white light". Recently we've got good at blending doping agents to give mixed spectrums that approximate daylight.
If these forms of electronic lighting have holes in their spectra, perhaps that's why an analysis of a corpus of photos shows a change in spectrum over time?
And trust me, it would be much better with LEDs though obviously not perfect. Sometimes the colors just aren't different enough to easily tell apart. It seems like an issue that should be fixed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index
But still beware, the CRI printed on the box (Ra) is kind of flawed since it is measured on unsaturated colors and does not include information about color renditions of red objects. You would have to look at the R9 value as well.
Vast majority of white LEDs are phosphor based and not color-mixing
Are you talking about single-colour LEDs? Since white LEDs use a "phosphor", just like fluorescent lights, that convert blue or UV light. In fact I thought that the phosphors used by LEDs today are much better than those used by fluorescent lights.
Maybe you're talking about RGB lights, which combine separate reg, green and blue LEDs so that the colour mix can be changed. But even then I thought, unlike lasers, LEDs are not using single frequencies but relatively wide bands (but will still leave gaps between the red, green and blue colours).
Wow. I didn't know that. So I guess the junction actually emits UV which is converted to visible spectrum? Does that mean they're bad for your eyes if some UV leaks out?
How I thought it worked is that different doping materials are blended in the junction to get a mix of frequencies. Maybe that's impossible.
And yes, sure for RGB clusters the spacing is obvious even to my eyes.
As far as I can see from distributors, most white LEDs today are using a blue light emitter, so there's no issue with UV. When using white LEDs that use an UV emitter, some glass covering is needed to catch the remainder, from what I've heard from a friend (I've never actually built an LED lamp myself). But it appears that blue LEDs are much more efficient than UV ones and that probably explains why normally white LEDs use blue emitters.
More information here (confirming what I just wrote): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#White
PS. I've been looking into these things to some extent because of all the issues with commercial LED lamps (short life, AC or PWM flickering, colour rendering), and have been thinking of mixing more LEDs together (various single colour ones together with various phosphor-employing ones) so as to mix a more ideal spectrum myself, but I haven't gotten around to actually executing that plan.
So no UV, although there are some concerns about the hazards of blue light. But if you ask me, you get much more blue light onto your retinas by just going outside on a sunny day than you'd ever get from normal LED lighting.
On the other hand I find it terrifying how many people will spend their lives cowering in quiet ignorance never venturing anything, and never learning anything, all for the fear of looking foolish.
The junction usually emits violet, but some blue ones exist too.
It's wasteful to emit UV. Fluorescent lights do it because it's not practical to tune them into visible light, but leds do not share that problem.
After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.
But they were in the past? I don't know but I wonder why this might have changed.
There's, relatedly, probably some effect from all those home makeover & house-buying shows, which constantly push "any 'weird' color is bad, and any room without great color coordination is bad, and it's not OK not to mind it". There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch about this, in which two home-buyers on such a show are presented a bathroom with avocado fixtures, and the host berates them over multiple takes because their initial reaction isn't as negative as it ought to be. Fiction, but there's definitely a kind of same-ness to people's reactions to any but a few acceptable colors on those shows.
I don't understand that argument. My toaster only needs to work in my kitchen, not every kitchen.
From a manufacture's point of view I get it. It is cheaper to produce 3 colors than 54.
In contrast, neutral colors will look good in any color palette and require zero design talent from your side.
palate / palette / pallet Your “palate” is the roof of your mouth, and by extension, your sense of taste. A “palette” is the flat board an artist mixes paint on (or by extension, a range of colors). A “pallet” is either a bed (now rare) or a flat platform onto which goods are loaded.
https://im01.itaiwantrade.com/f741c34e-0130-464b-a4d0-1607a2...
In any case, many people might have a vague idea that stainless steel is more durable, but not be able to tell the difference between stainless steel, chrome painted hard plastic, or galvanized steel. I wonder if the study accounted for that.
I think you're making a really good point. If there was an obvious durability difference between toasters (plastic vs. stainless steel), I'd take the steel one even if I liked the cherry red one better. If the red one I preferred were also steel, then that would be the question this experiment intends to examine (I'd be choosing on color.)
Colorful shit is often cheap shit.
edit: You can get plastic stuff "stainless steel color" by plating it with a thin foil, but then I'm definitely going for one of the colorful, dyed plastics, because that stuff is going to flake off.
The name of the color would be silver, but silver color is a wider range of colors, silver is also confusingly just the name of a metal which it is not, and also would include "silver paint on top of stainless steel".
What you see is different from what I see (not to mention that I am a daltonist) - and none of these are standardized.
We are used to colors and this is why we label them.
So "chrome" is absolutely a color, like "salmon" and "fuschia" is, or "gold" or "brownish"
You could buy a red toaster or a blue toaster, and you'd have every reason to think that it's different paint or dyes, but an otherwise equivalent product made of the same underlying materials.
Whereas stainless steel partly refers to a small range of colors, but mainly to the properties of the material.
In the context of kitchen appliances stainless steel products are almost always of higher quality and durability.
As an example: You can find stainless steel fridges, and cheap fridges, but no cheap stainless steel fridges.
If you were offering me a red or stainless steel fridge sight unseen I'd always go for the stainless one, even if I much preferred red to stainless as a look.
I could always glue a red MDF panel to the door, but the advantages of "stainless" would extend to other premium aspects of the fridge.
Interesting, I'd never heard this term before.
> Red–green color blindness: This form of colorblindness is sometimes referred to as daltonism after John Dalton, who had red-green dichromacy. In some languages, daltonism is still used to describe red-green color blindness.
From the search results that popped up, the word "daltonist" seems to be used in Romanian, Serbian, and Bosnian languages.
Lime green is nice when it is short lived, but lime green isn't as nice in year 25, after your tastes have changed.
Hot pink is very eye catching, so it got the votes. On the other hand hot pink is very eye catching, who wants their toaster to be the center of attention?
People would go crazy over a red or white ThinkPad in focus groups, but would never buy one because they couldn't see themselves as "that person" with the red laptop at a meeting.
Lenovo did make both a red and white x100e a long while ago, but those were more like netbooks.
It adds up too. Companies like Apple have long advertised with a diverse range of colors for their devices, but I think most people settle on black / white in the end because it's more neutral / doesn't stand out.
At some point people had trouble distinguishing their grey macbook pro from the hundred other macbook pros. First that was resolved with full size sticker and covers (which were cute in that they used the illuminated apple logo on the back as a feature), then with... a very wild and colorful range of stickers they save up from conferences and the like.
It was an interesting thing to witness, having big groups of people with bland, uniform, sleek and neutral, to a very nerdy form of self-expression and standing out from the crowd.
And I mean annoyingly forced things that should never be that color.
Example: the other day I saw some youtube video of upcoming videogames and many of them have, somehow, parts of purple smoke in fire explosions, the engine exhaust of the Millenium Falcon going from its classic light blue to purplish, lights and shadows that do not match the natural environment forced to subtle purplish.
Not to mention the mandatory login screen of macOS Monterrey.
1. White as a car color is much more practical in any place that gets a lot of direct sun. In e.g. South Africa you might drive around all day and not see anything except white cars. In Western and Southern Europe their popularity is a rough approximation of summer heat and sunlight in the area.
2. These photographs are by-and-large leaving ignoring practicalities. Sure, a natural wooden wall is nice, but it also needs more maintenance to look like that than one that's painted white.
3. For kitchens boring colors are practically synonymous with an increase in durability and the ability to withstand water. It's easy to get stainless steel, or a white and black marble countertop, you can't paint stainless steel and still place a hot pan on it, a wooden countertop is going to be subject to rot over time, particularly with water ingress. Once you pick stainless steel or white/black for major surfaces others tend to follow.
Companies often choose white cars as well for their fleets: you can easily put a big company logo on a white car - and it will probably look good.
I bet lots of people would choose different colors, if this didnt require to pay additional 1000-2000 dollars. (Also again practicality comes to mind: if you buy a car in an uncommon color you will have problems to get spare parts). This additional fee might be not much for a software developer from Silicon Valley who earns 300k per year, but is a big thing for most of the world.
As far as I know, when you want a non-standard color, for many cars it is cheaper to partially disassemble the body and wrap it in those plastic stickers than to ask the factory to paint it (not to mention that it will take few months before you get your car delivered, why you probably want it now). Only a small section of people does this though.
I bet if the prices of uncommon colors were lower, one could see much more unusual cars.
In fact in some ways the manufacturers are the ones who set the palette (probably based on market research), some colors come in unusual colors straight from the factory. So you 'have' to choose the fancy color, since the car does not come in boring ones. Or at least the unusual color is cheaper (few hundred dollars -> still a lot for many people). For example every now and often a manufacturer comes out with some variant of orange, or orange-red: https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2021/12/orange-cars-you-...
In many ways car color is an illusion of choice: if you dont want to pay 2k dollars and wait few months, you have to take one of the boring colors that are available on the lot for you -> and those 'boring' were selected by the manufacturers, since their market research showed that they will sell. Tons of people cant afford to pay more to have a car that looks different. But judging by the amount of stickers you see on cars, perhaps they would.
Of course customers can order customized cars, but the dealership will always prefer to sell the stock that they have on hand. So while special ordering a colorful car might be only slightly more expensive than special ordering a white car, special ordering anything for any reason will loose you all negotiating power and cost you thousands of dollars in the final price. I might want a colorful car, but I don't want to pay that much more for a colorful car, so I settle for white.
[1] <https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/351621.Chromophobia>
Regarding cars however, this is likely due to costs of colorful paint as scale.
My pet theory is that car colors tend to reflect society's mood, and we've been in a dour one for some time.
I feel like part of the movement towards grayscale is that people are afraid to stand out. I can always easily find my car in a parking lot, because it stands out. People can find me in a group, because I stand out. I'm glad I don't care too much about the opinions of other people, so I just wear what I want to and don't try to blend in. I also feel bad for people who don't wear what they'd like to because they're afraid to stand out, because you only get one lifetime.
I personally also hate that the already dreadful winter is made even more dreadful by everyone wearing dark clothing. Please all buy something colorful to wear next winter... It's safer too!
I started this back in 2010 as a safety measure when cycling from home to Uni, and rapidly decided I liked it.
I’ve progressively branded myself more and more in bright orange. Funny thing is it isn’t even close to my favourite colour.
My car is “velocity red”. Pity it’s not metallic orange or green or some other more interesting colour, but I certainly don’t care enough to foot the bill to repaint it.
I had a dark gray car many years ago that I wanted to wrap in matte black, but I just never got around to it then ended up selling it.
I have some orange t-shirts that I love, but if I'm going out on a trip to the country to look for wildlife there is no way I'd wear them - I choose muted natural greens and khaki instead (although I don't actually wear camo gear). Also, when I photographing anywhere where I might be partially visible in a window reflection I wear clothes that don't have stripes, because these stand out like a sore thumb.
That's odd, I dress in colourful clothes and I get positive comments both from people who are themselves dressed in bright colours and from people very drably dressed. Perhaps it differs from place to place.
I think there is a small minority of people that either want attention, or don't mind it.
The rest of the world wants to avoid drawing attention to themselves. This is true for both positive and negative attention. I don't think it's so much about what others think, I think it's just that attention is uncomfortable for most people, and they do what they can to blend in as to avoid drawing attention and feeling uncomfortable.
If the world were more colorful, this may mean not wearing neutral colors, as this would now stand out and likely draw attention.
Abed: "3's and 2's tend to wear neutral colors. Looking like you want to move up can get you moved down..." [Abed waves to people in the distance] "Those are other 3's. We talk about how we're glad we're not 2's." [Abed stands to leave] "Small talk guys... I make small talk now."
Marketing: When presented with a colorful choice, people will buy the gray/white and neutral palette. We will create a colorful campaign to ignite emotional response.
Business Development: We love this approach. It makes business sense. Go for it.
Psychologist: In the past, people were open-minded and tolerated more artistic and individual choices. Nowadays, every one is in search of the safe zone for social validation and compliance. Big Brands create a culture of subtle colors and people love it.
I'm a man and I've recently started wearing a lot of "Hawaiian" shirts (loud, colorful prints) and I get a lot of compliments on the street. Not sure if it's about the color or about wearing something that reads as a "party" shirt, though.
this thread wasn't talking about fashion choices anyway. the reason for this is totally uninteresting. we're seeing the circumstances of assets like cars and houses being sold to future people and surviving, and the ones that future people by have less of the prior owner's personality to them.
why are new houses so boxy and drab? consider that the brutalist VA building in Chicago and federal building in boston are equally as historically important, if not more so, than your average twee little crumbling victorian in san francisco. but hey, you can demolish the "ugly" buildings and critically, do something fuck all different with the land, than those absolutely destitute sticks buildings. i don't think the economic stories are interesting.
The Victorian houses are nice but they all need to go.
But yeah, people are afraid of standing out. Once a friend told me he'd love to do the same, but he did not have the guts to do it, so he keeps wearing dim clothes.
One day there was a case of mistaken identity when there was one other person at the resort with an orange cap.
Not neon pink or anything. Just regular 70s orange.
but sure, I'm positive there's some towns where dressing in bright colors is frowned on. Not sure where that would be. Even Elvis and Roy Rogers wore outlandish clothing.
In my experience there is much more conformity in rural areas in the mid-south, especially in middle class spaces. I even notice it if I take a flight from the east coast to Tulsa, Oklahoma. The first flight to a hub like Atlanta has a normal variety of people in a normal variety of dress. Then the second leg you suddenly notice a significant decrease in variety. It's just kind of obvious if you see it, so idk why you haven't noticed it unless you're not very well travelled in the USA.
It sounds like you are making inferences about Tennessee based on what your friends from there are like, but they are your friends (and it sounds like they chose to move from TN to wherever you are) so this is in many ways a biased sample. A more accurate way is to observe random people. I would be more interested in hearing your observations from when you actually visited Tennessee than your inferences you think you can make from knowing someone who is from there.
I myself have anecdotical accounts of this. It couples with decreasing personalization. Today even the desktop picture is seldom changed by the end user.