How Men See Colors

Guys, how often are you being corrected on your descriptions of things? I’d say I’m pretty good at the spoken and written word…. except where it comes to describing colors.

Men see in one-word colors: blue, purple, yellow, green…… you know what I mean. “That Ferrari is red.” “Look at that crazy blue shirt!”

Women? Holy cow, you need a book—or an app—to describe anything, and it is never a single-word color. I just looked up and found at least thirty shades of blue, ranging from Celeste to Midnight Blue. At least as many purple shades from Amethyst to Violet, and even more yellow—from Acacia to Yellow Rose. Just look at any photo of plants or trees to see the literally hundreds of shades of green. Guess what? Each one has its own name! And Shades of Grey- we know at least fifty (lol)!

Guess what—there is a scientific basis to this! In a 2012 Brooklyn College study, women really did excel in discerning shades of blue, yellow and green. The biological reason seems to be how testosterone (or lack of) affects neuron development in the brain’s visual cortex.

Evolution at work? Women, as gatherers, may have become better adapted to recognizing close-at-hand, static objects such as wild berries. Men, on the other hand, have been found to have “significantly greater sensitivity for fine detail and for rapidly moving stimuli”. This means that men—who were the hunters—could “detect possible predators or prey from afar and also identify and categorize these objects more easily.”

Whew! That makes a lot of sense to me (I’ll write about this in another blog), and now I don’t feel so bad!

I have lovely pink fabric gowns in my office, which are much nicer than the blue paper ones I used to have. But I just found out the gowns aren’t pink—they are Dusty Rose! I bet even those old paper gowns were more Aero than blue. But I can see a dusty deer at 300 yards!!