The Importance Of Color

Color is an integral part of how people view and define the world. It has become an important part of everyday life in society and has many different uses, such as being used by people as a means to express themselves in order to differentiate themselves from others. In different societies certain colors have also gained specific connotations, and these meanings can range from a sign of warning to a sign of happiness. Color, however, is not how most people understand it, as it is not a definitive property of an object. It is merely a construction created by our brains when light is being reflected off objects. Color is an individual’s perception of that reflected light, so it cannot be proven that what one person sees is exactly the same as what other people sees, especially since there is no way to purely define a color. Because the perception of color is subjective, when looking at color people should not believe what they see, as its perception is unreliable.
Perception is simply the use of the senses in order to gain information, and since people’s senses don’t always pick up on the same things, various people perceive different things differently. Color is perceived through the sense of sight, but it is impossible to define color without delving into the science behind it. Color should not be thought about in the way people were taught to, as “the first thing to remember is that colour does not actually exist… at least not in any literal sense. Apples and fire engines are not red, the sky and sea are not blue, and no person is objectively ‘black’ or ‘white’” (“Do you see what I see?”). Simply put, color is the reflection of light. In the eye people have photoreceptor cells called cones that are able to pick up light that is ...

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...there just because it thinks they should be there, and not because they actually are there ("In Living Color."). People may be able to see colors, but what people think they see is not always what is really there. For example, the picture below from National Geographic ("Watch This!") shows two squares with different colors, right? Well that is actually wrong, because the two blocks are actually the same color. If the line separating the two blocks is covered with some fingers, then the blocks turn into the same color. This is no trick of the picture, and instead it is the trick of the eyes due to color constancy. The context that the line separating the blocks provides distorts our perception of the color, and when the context is removed then people are able to see what is really there. Just because people perceive something, doesn’t mean that it’s actually real.