October 31, 2025 • 26 mins
What’s your favorite color? Where do colors come from?Why do people see colors? Does everyone see colors the same way? How many colors are there in the world? We learn about colors with Kassia St. Clair, the author of a book called The Secret Lives of Color. We talk about the science of color as well as all the ways color and culture are intertwined.
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Jane (00:20):
This is But Why
Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. Onthis show, we take questions
from curious kids just like you,and we find answers. What's your
favorite color? Colors are allaround us. When you walk into a
room, if you're a sightedperson, you might notice that
the walls are painted in yellow,gray or white, or off-white, or
(00:43):
eggshell white or creamy white.When you pick out your socks in
the morning, do you grab adifferent colored pair depending
on your mood? Red, if you'refeeling feisty, purple if you're
feeling bold? Flowers come inall kinds of striking hues. And
if you've ever looked at afemale cardinal, you'll see the
most beautiful gradations ofbrown and gold, from her amber
(01:07):
colored chest to her soft graybrown back and a tuft of red at
the crest of her head. We'vegotten lots of questions from
you about color, and that's notsurprising, because colors
really are everywhere.
Eleanor (01:19):
My name is Eleanor, and I'm eight years old, and I'm
from Georgia. And where docolors come from?
Hannah (01:25):
My name is Hannah. I'm from Detroit, Michigan. I'm six
years old. Where do colors comefrom?
Jane (01:34):
Let's first talk about what we mean when we say color.
Color has a lot to do withlight. When light shines on an
object, that object absorbscertain wavelengths of light and
reflects other ones. Thematerial the object is made out
of determines what wavelengthsare absorbed and which ones are
reflected. Our eyes only see thelight that has reflected, or
(01:58):
bounced off the object, not thelight that is absorbed. And our
brain interprets thosewavelengths that have bounced
off as different colors. Forexample, let's say you have a
let you know what colors you're seeing, but it also then
nice, ripe strawberry. Thestrawberry's skin is soaking up
blue and green wavelengths andbouncing the red light back to
(02:18):
your eyes! So you see thatstrawberry as red. But how do we
know if our brains are allinterpreting that red color the
same way? Midhaa, who is 11,from Kerala, India, has a question.
(03:32):
associates those colors withfeelings and experiences. For
this part of the conversation,let's bring in our special
guest.
Kassia St. Clair (03:40):
I am Kassia St. Clair, and I am a writer.
Jane (03:43):
Kassia is the author of a book called The Secret Lives of
Color. She's been fascinated bycolor for a long time. When she
was a kid, Kassia's mom was aflorist, so she spent a lot of
time at the flower shop afterschool, observing what kinds of
colors go together in a bouquetof flowers and what types of
flowers are popular for certainoccasions. When Kassia became an
(04:05):
adult, she decided to learn andwrite about colors. In fact, she
wrote a whole book about them.Kassia's work focuses on the
ways we think about colors andhow they take on different
cultural meanings.
Kassia St. Clair (04:17):
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 eyesis roughly similar, what's
happening in the brain, kind ofbehind the scenes can be very,
very different and can be reallyinfluenced by our own
experiences. So for example,imagine if you grew up in a
(04:40):
bedroom, and the walls of yourbedroom were painted blue, and
you loved your bedroom, foreverafter, you might have really
positive associations about thecolor blue. Now, someone else
might feel very differentlyabout blue. They might associate
it with a time they got reallyembarrassed at school and the
walls of that room were blue so.So your experience of color will
(05:02):
be very different. And the otherthing is that not everyone's
eyes are the same. Lots ofpeople have something that's
called color blindness, or colorvision deficiency, and so you
might perceive color slightlydifferently, and that's a lot
more common in boys and men thanit is in women, because the
parts of our DNA which areresponsible for our eyesight are
(05:26):
encoded in in the part of theDNA that is kind of more present
for women than it is for men.And as technology is now
emerging to kind of correctcolor vision, so if you do have
color blindness, there are nowkind of glasses that you can put
on that can allow you to betterperceive the colors that you
might have naturally struggledwith.
Jane (05:46):
In my family, we have arguments about the difference
between blue and purple, andsome 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 willsay, Are you kidding? That's
blue. There's no way it'spurple. It's not even close to
(06:07):
purple. It's just blue. Andthat's all there is to it. And
we can sit in our corners andnever agree on that, and it's
impossible for us to tell, arewe seeing different things with
our brains, or are we seeing thesame color fundamentally, and we
just think of it in differentcategories, and it's always kind
(06:28):
of a fun fight for us, becauseit's just clear how different
our brains see things and howdifferently we interpret things,
but we don't know whether it'ssomething physical in our brains
or just in the way we thinkabout what category it is.
Kassia St. Clair (06:40):
It's so mysterious how we, how each
person sees color. I love thatthere's all this, this mystery.
I think it makes it such a greattopic to study.
Eleanor (06:51):
Hi, my name is Abilene. I'm eight years old. I live in
Scotts Valley, California. Whyare like dogs can't see that
many colors, but humans can andwhy is vision for different
animals different?
Susanna (07:06):
Hi, but why? My name is Susanna. I live in Arkansas, and
I'm 10 years old. Why do dogssee different colors than
humans?
Jane (07:13):
We said that most people have three types of cones in our
retinas that help us detectdifferent colors. Dogs have only
two so they see fewer colorsthan we do. Dogs can't really
distinguish red from othercolors, but they can see blue
and yellow. So if you've everseen a dog having trouble
finding a red ball in a greenfield, that's probably because
(07:35):
the red doesn't stand outagainst the green grass in their
eyes, they all look like kind ofthe same shades of muddy brown.
But then again, my dog can smelland hear things way better than
I do, and dogs can see better inthe dark than we can. So I guess
you win some, you lose some. Youknow, some animals actually have
(07:56):
a much wider range of colorreception than dogs, or us,
humans. Birds, for example, areknown to have four types of
cones, those color sensitivereceptors in their eyes, where
we have three. Butterflies havefive, and mantis shrimp have 12
to 16 photoreceptors and caneven see infrared and polarized
(08:19):
light. It's fun to imagine whatthe world would look like if you
had the ability to see even morecolors or more wavelengths of
light. The world might look verydifferent. 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 JaneLindholm, and today we're
(08:40):
talking with Kassia St. Clair,author of The Secret Lives of
Color. She's answering yourcolorful questions.
Freya (08:47):
Hi, I'm Freya. I'm six years old, and how is colors
invented?
Parker (08:52):
My name is Parker. I'm six years old. I live in
Birmingham, Alabama. Whodiscovered color?
Jane (09:04):
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 lightthat bounce off of other
objects. But beyond that,there's also the way we think
and talk about color, and humanshave found lots of ways to make
pigments so we can havedifferent colored toys and
(09:25):
clothes and crayons and paints.
Kassia St. Clair (09:27):
Colors come from lots of different places.
Is it a paint that you have in atube that you paint a picture
with? Or is it a paint that youput on the wall of your house?
Or is it a color of a jumper ora pair of trousers? All of those
colors will come from slightlydifferent places, and most of
(09:50):
the time today, the colors thatwe use will be made in a
factory. There'll becombinations of different kinds
of chemicals, substances thatscientists work with and put
them together in differentcombinations, and they create
something new, but in the oldendays, so, you know, maybe 200
(10:11):
years ago and before then,people weren't generally using
chemicals to make color, or theysometimes were, but more often,
they were using the colors thatare found naturally in the world
around us, and there areactually 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
(10:33):
is different colors. The otherplaces where you might find
color are in insects. So lots ofinsects create color, or indeed,
snails, sea snails create color.
Alaina (10:44):
I'm Elena, and I'm eight years old, and I'm from Alberta,
Canada. How many colors are inthe world?
Addison (10:51):
My name is Addison. I live in Milford, Pennsylvania.
How many colors are in theworld?
Gigi (10:59):
Hi. My name is Gigi. I'm nine years old. I live in Sand
Springs, Oklahoma. Why are thereso many different colors?
Jane (11:07):
There are a couple different ways to think about
this question. Scientists sayhumans can see millions of
distinct color gradations withour eyes. But there's also
another way of looking at itthat has to do with how colors
exist in our minds and ourcultures, and Kassia says that
number is infinite.
Kassia St. Clair (11:26):
The truth is that the number of colors that
there are is everlasting. We'reall over the world, and no
matter where you are in theworld, you'll be thinking about
colors in new ways, and that canchange even over the course of
your lifetime. So, for example,I'm now 40 years old. When I was
growing up, the color avocadogreen had a really specific
(11:47):
meaning. It was seen as reallyold fashioned and and something
a color that had been reallyfashionable in the 1970s. But
now avocado green meanssomething a bit different,
because the world has changedslightly. Avocados have become
much more associated with reallyyoung people with avocado toast,
which is something that you mayor may not enjoy for your your
(12:08):
breakfast or your lunch, andmaybe in ten years time, that
won't be one of the first thingsyou think about. And that
process is happening all thetime. We're constantly thinking
about colors in new ways.
Alan (12:19):
My name is Alan. I am six years old. I live in Brewster,
New York. How do colors gettheir names?
Kassia St. Clair (12:31):
So there's kind of two processes that
happen. There's a kind ofofficial process, by which I
mean a company, for example, acompany that makes paint for
your house or paint for your carmight create a new color, and
then they'll sit in an officeand they'll think about how best
to name it. So for example, if anail polish company is creating
(12:53):
a new red polish at Christmastime, they would probably want
the name to indicate the rednessof the color. But they probably
also want a name that issuggestive of Christmas, and so
they might call it Santa's Cape,for example, but the exact same
color, if it's being released inMay or June, and this might have
(13:14):
a very different name. All of asudden, it might be Apple Red or
something like that. But youalso, again, have this kind of
more open process by whichpeople, ordinary people, aren't
negotiating the namesthemselves. And so a really good
example of this is the colorScarlet, which is a bright shade
of red. Now, Scarlet actually,initially wasn't the name of a
(13:39):
color. It was the name of a typeof cloth, a really beautiful,
very fine, very luxurious, verysoft woolen cloth. And it made
sense, when you were producingsuch a wonderful cloth, to dye
it the most expensive color. Noone wants to buy the most
beautiful cloth in the world andhave it a color that is really
(14:01):
unfashionable, and the colorthat was most fashionable and
expensive at the time whenScarlet was the most beautiful
cloth, was a bright red. Andover time, the color that this
cloth was always dyed borrowedthe name for the type of cloth.
And so Scarlet went from being atype of cloth to a type of red.
Jane (14:20):
So it would almost be as if cotton was a name for a
color, or polyester was a nameof a color that we all identify.
Kassia St. Clair (14:29):
Exactly.
Jane (14:30):
What about the colors that are seen as just sort of your
basic colors of the rainbow? Howdo we get names for things like
red, orange, blue, yellow?
Kassia St. Clair (14:42):
In English and in a lot of other languages, you
have kind of around about thesame number of colors that we
all agree are the kind of basiccolors, red, green, blue. But
that isn't the case for alllanguages. So not all languages
agree on what is a basic color.So some languages only have
three basic color terms. Theywill divide the entire spectrum
(15:07):
of all the colors in the rainbowinto just three. They'll have
light colors, dark colors andred. Other languages and other
countries have, you know, dividethe rainbow up differently. So
for example, in Russia and inthe Russian language, blue isn't
one color, it's divided intotwo. There's light blue and
(15:28):
there's dark blue, siniy andgoluboy. And in Korea, they
divide green up into two,regular green and kind of
yellowy green. And lots oflanguages have added or or
gotten rid of colors over time.So if you were to go to Japan
around about 100 years ago, theywould have the same word for
(15:50):
both blue and green. They nowhave separate words, but that's
pretty recent. So yeah, theanswer is that those basic color
terms depend on what yourculture and what your language
believe is a basic color, andnot all languages agree.
Jane (16:08):
Think about that for a second. If you live in a place
with a language thatdifferentiates between green and
blue, you might walk outside andsay, hey, that car is green and
that other car is blue. But ifyou speak a language that sees
green and blue as one color,your brain will think, look,
there are two blue cars inslightly different shades!
Charlie (16:29):
My name is Charlie. I'm six years old. I'm from Long
Beach, California. Is white acolor or not?
Kassia St. Clair (16:39):
So that's a really good question, and there
is a way that a physicist mightanswer it, and then there's the
way an everyday person wouldanswer it. And a physicist would
tell you that white and blackare not really colors, they're
more expressions of light. So ifyou've got the full spectrum of
visible light, you will perceivethat as white. And if you've got
(17:03):
none of it, you will perceivethat thing as black. But for
ordinary people, we go into ashop and we pick white paint, we
pick a black pair of jeans, andso we experience white and black
as colors. Those are usefulcolor groups, and they are as
(17:23):
valid a color as blue or green.But they're not, these things
aren't perfectly white in theway that a physicist is thinking
of, as an expression of light,or perfectly black, the absence
of light, but they are in thecategory. They are a type of
black. They are a type of white.But it's very, very difficult to
experience pure white or puredark. There's a substance that
(17:48):
was created a few years agocalled vantablack, and that
substance absorbs 99.965% of thevisible spectrum. So what this
looked like is, it's reallyuncanny. Essentially, you could
no longer see any depth in anobject that's coated with the
substance. And what do I mean bythat? So I was shown vantablack
(18:12):
on a piece of crumpled upaluminum or aluminum foil. So
ordinarily, when you see a pieceof foil, you can see that it
has, it's got differenttextures. It's been scrumpled up
a little bit. Different areas ofthe foil reflect light in
different ways. And so you knowthat that object is 3D, you know
(18:32):
it's got bits that are furtheraway from you and closer towards
you. But when you coat that samepiece of foil with vantablack,
which absorbs 99.965% of thelight, all you can see is a
flat, black space. You know thatthat is a piece of crumpled
foil, but you are no longer ableto see any definition in the
(18:55):
foil at all. It just looks flat.And so a round ball looks the
same as a circle. And a carwouldn't like a car. It would
just look like an outline of acar. So it reduces our ability
to perceive depth.
Jane (19:10):
I want to play a prank on my family now. I want to paint
all of my chairs vantablack andthen say, go sit down. And
they'd be like but there'snothing to sit on. Because it
just it wouldn't, it would looklike the shape of an outline of
a chair, but it wouldn't looklike... I wouldn't be able to
see that there is a flat placefor me to sit and a place for me
to put my back. It just lookslike one solid...
Kassia St. Clair (19:31):
Like a blob. Yeah,
Jane (19:33):
that's very cool.
Kassia St. Clair (19:34):
Very cool.
Jane (19:35):
We've learned a lot today about how our eyes and brains
work together to interpret colorand how different people and
cultures and languages thinkabout colors differently. Let's
end with this question fromNoah.
Noah (19:48):
I live in South Salem, New York, and I'm 10 years old. Why
do colors make you feeldifferent emotions?
Kassia St. Clair (19:54):
So what you've got going on is you've got the
way that a kind of the broadestculture feel about a color. So
this is information that we pickup from the world around us. So
that includes adverts that wesee, the language that we're
speaking with, and so on and soforth. So you have really broad
generalizations, like red isoften associated with action, so
(20:20):
things like anger or stop or,you know, really kind of words
that need to be obeyedimmediately, ideas that need to
be obeyed immediately, thingsthat are sudden. And we kind of
take this understanding into ourexperience of the word red. You
then might have more specificthings. You might have something
(20:42):
in your own city. You might havelike the metro. All the metro
stations use red signage, and sothat will probably make you
think of transport, even ifyou're not immediately aware
that that is part of yourunderstanding of the color red.
It will inform yourunderstanding of it. And then
you have, like, what I call thethrow on the, on the sofa. You
(21:04):
then have the kind of your ownpersonal experience of it. How,
how did you grow up? Did youhave toys that were this
particular color when you weregrowing up? Was it your parents'
favorite color? Is it yourfavorite color? Did you choose
to name your dog Scarlet, forexample? And all these things
will act together in ourexperience of how we feel about
(21:26):
a color. But you also have otherthings going on, possibly, and
this is where it becomes reallydifficult, because there is some
evidence, and lots of peoplebelieve that certain colors make
all humans feel a certain way,just because that's how we're
hard wired to behave. So lots ofpeople believe that red, again,
(21:49):
to take the red example, makesus gives us kind of a jolt of
energy and makes us moreaggressive, makes us more angry,
makes us more passionate. Theproblem is, is that it's
absolutely impossible to testfor this in a in a scientific
way, because you cannot remove ahuman being from everything,
(22:09):
from their culture, and so youcan't really completely unpick
what it is that's ingrained inall humans and what it is that
we grow up with and that weunderstand from living in the
world around us.
Jane (22:21):
Right, because sometimes you'll hear people say, if you
want to create a calmingenvironment for anybody who's
going to come into that room,you should paint the room yellow
or blue. I can't even rememberwhich ones, but what you're
saying is we don't know ifthat's because everybody's brain
thinks of that color as acalming color, or if it's
(22:42):
because we think it's calming,because that's what we've grown
up with, and that's what ourculture has told us. There's no
way to figure that outscientifically yet, at any rate.
Kassia St. Clair (22:51):
Yet.
Jane (22:51):
Is there any other story about color that you think just
blow everyone's mind?
Kassia St. Clair (22:57):
Yeah, so I think a lot of people think of
pink as being quite a girlycolor and blue as being quite a
boyish color. But if you go backa hundred years, actually,
people thought of it completelythe opposite way around. People
thought about pink as being acolor for boys and blue as being
(23:18):
a color for girls. And if youlook at the way that they talked
about blue and pink, then theysaid that pink was more decided,
it was more masculine, it waskind of more aggressive, and
blue was more gentle andfeminine. 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 themore was the more feminine
(23:41):
color, and pink was the moremasculine color. And he and his
partner, Gilly, they had kind ofessentially matching walking
sticks. One was blue and one waspink, and my dad's one was the
pink one, and Gilly's one wasthe blue one. And that seemed
entirely natural and normal tothem. And I find it really funny
that in just in a relativelyshort period of time, in just
(24:07):
100 years in the span of onelife, that meaning and
understanding has completelyswitched around. And I think
it's really interesting toimagine, if we all grow up to
100, what color meanings wouldhave completely shifted over in
our lifetime. Will green, youknow, now, I think people think
people think of green as beinglike kind of a natural color,
(24:28):
and to do with nature, maybethat won't be the case in a
hundred years time. Maybe we'llthink of something else. Or
maybe when we think of yellow,we won't immediately think of
sunshine, we'll think ofsomething else. We just don't
know yet. And again, this is whyI love the subject of color.
Jane (24:38):
And honestly, at this point, if you like pink or blue
or green or yellow or whatevercolor you can like whatever
color you want!
Kassia St. Clair (24:45):
Absolutely. Colors are for everyone. And
these meanings that we attach tothem, that sometimes seem so
rigid and like rules, they aregoing to change. They do change.
We can see them changing. And soeven if something seems like a
really hard and fast rule,something that definitely should
be obeyed, just remember theexample of pink and blue. They
(25:06):
feel a certain way now, but thatwasn't always the case, and it
may not always be the case inthe future. Who knows? In ten
years time, twenty years time,this may have all changed.
Jane (25:14):
Thanks to Kassia St. Clair, author of The Secret
Lives of Color, for helping usthink about the universe of
color and how much it's tied tothe way we think about the world
around us. Do you have afavorite color? We'd love to
know and how that color makesyou feel. Send us a video, and
we'll pop it up on our Instagramand YouTube pages. As always, if
(25:36):
you have a question aboutanything, have an adult record.
You asking it on a smartphoneusing an app like voice memos,
then have your adult email thefile to
questions@butwhykids.org. Ourshow is produced by Melody
Bodette, Sarah Baik and me, JaneLindholm at Vermont Public and
distributed by PRX. Our videoproducer is Joey Palumbo, and
(25:56):
our theme music is by LukeReynolds. If you like our show,
please have your adults help yougive us a thumbs up or a review
on whatever podcast platform youuse. It helps other kids and
families find us. We'll be backin two weeks with an all new
episode. Until then, stay curious!
This is But Why
Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. Onthis show, we take questions
from curious kids just like you,and we find answers. What's your
favorite color? Colors are allaround us. When you walk into a
room, if you're a sightedperson, you might notice that
the walls are painted in yellow,gray or white, or off-white, or
(00:43):
eggshell white or creamy white.When you pick out your socks in
the morning, do you grab adifferent colored pair depending
on your mood? Red, if you'refeeling feisty, purple if you're
feeling bold? Flowers come inall kinds of striking hues. And
if you've ever looked at afemale cardinal, you'll see the
most beautiful gradations ofbrown and gold, from her amber
(01:07):
colored chest to her soft graybrown back and a tuft of red at
the crest of her head. We'vegotten lots of questions from
you about color, and that's notsurprising, because colors
really are everywhere.
Eleanor (01:19):
My name is Eleanor, and I'm eight years old, and I'm
from Georgia. And where docolors come from?
Hannah (01:25):
My name is Hannah. I'm from Detroit, Michigan. I'm six
years old. Where do colors comefrom?
Jane (01:34):
Let's first talk about what we mean when we say color.
Color has a lot to do withlight. When light shines on an
object, that object absorbscertain wavelengths of light and
reflects other ones. Thematerial the object is made out
of determines what wavelengthsare absorbed and which ones are
reflected. Our eyes only see thelight that has reflected, or
(01:58):
bounced off the object, not thelight that is absorbed. And our
brain interprets thosewavelengths that have bounced
off as different colors. Forexample, let's say you have a
let you know what colors you're seeing, but it also then
nice, ripe strawberry. Thestrawberry's skin is soaking up
blue and green wavelengths andbouncing the red light back to
(02:18):
your eyes! So you see thatstrawberry as red. But how do we
know if our brains are allinterpreting that red color the
same way? Midhaa, who is 11,from Kerala, India, has a question.
(03:32):
associates those colors withfeelings and experiences. For
this part of the conversation,let's bring in our special
guest.
Kassia St. Clair (03:40):
I am Kassia St. Clair, and I am a writer.
Jane (03:43):
Kassia is the author of a book called The Secret Lives of
Color. She's been fascinated bycolor for a long time. When she
was a kid, Kassia's mom was aflorist, so she spent a lot of
time at the flower shop afterschool, observing what kinds of
colors go together in a bouquetof flowers and what types of
flowers are popular for certainoccasions. When Kassia became an
(04:05):
adult, she decided to learn andwrite about colors. In fact, she
wrote a whole book about them.Kassia's work focuses on the
ways we think about colors andhow they take on different
cultural meanings.
Kassia St. Clair (04:17):
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 eyesis roughly similar, what's
happening in the brain, kind ofbehind the scenes can be very,
very different and can be reallyinfluenced by our own
experiences. So for example,imagine if you grew up in a
(04:40):
bedroom, and the walls of yourbedroom were painted blue, and
you loved your bedroom, foreverafter, you might have really
positive associations about thecolor blue. Now, someone else
might feel very differentlyabout blue. They might associate
it with a time they got reallyembarrassed at school and the
walls of that room were blue so.So your experience of color will
(05:02):
be very different. And the otherthing is that not everyone's
eyes are the same. Lots ofpeople have something that's
called color blindness, or colorvision deficiency, and so you
might perceive color slightlydifferently, and that's a lot
more common in boys and men thanit is in women, because the
parts of our DNA which areresponsible for our eyesight are
(05:26):
encoded in in the part of theDNA that is kind of more present
for women than it is for men.And as technology is now
emerging to kind of correctcolor vision, so if you do have
color blindness, there are nowkind of glasses that you can put
on that can allow you to betterperceive the colors that you
might have naturally struggledwith.
Jane (05:46):
In my family, we have arguments about the difference
between blue and purple, andsome 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 willsay, Are you kidding? That's
blue. There's no way it'spurple. It's not even close to
(06:07):
purple. It's just blue. Andthat's all there is to it. And
we can sit in our corners andnever agree on that, and it's
impossible for us to tell, arewe seeing different things with
our brains, or are we seeing thesame color fundamentally, and we
just think of it in differentcategories, and it's always kind
(06:28):
of a fun fight for us, becauseit's just clear how different
our brains see things and howdifferently we interpret things,
but we don't know whether it'ssomething physical in our brains
or just in the way we thinkabout what category it is.
Kassia St. Clair (06:40):
It's so mysterious how we, how each
person sees color. I love thatthere's all this, this mystery.
I think it makes it such a greattopic to study.
Eleanor (06:51):
Hi, my name is Abilene. I'm eight years old. I live in
Scotts Valley, California. Whyare like dogs can't see that
many colors, but humans can andwhy is vision for different
animals different?
Susanna (07:06):
Hi, but why? My name is Susanna. I live in Arkansas, and
I'm 10 years old. Why do dogssee different colors than
humans?
Jane (07:13):
We said that most people have three types of cones in our
retinas that help us detectdifferent colors. Dogs have only
two so they see fewer colorsthan we do. Dogs can't really
distinguish red from othercolors, but they can see blue
and yellow. So if you've everseen a dog having trouble
finding a red ball in a greenfield, that's probably because
(07:35):
the red doesn't stand outagainst the green grass in their
eyes, they all look like kind ofthe same shades of muddy brown.
But then again, my dog can smelland hear things way better than
I do, and dogs can see better inthe dark than we can. So I guess
you win some, you lose some. Youknow, some animals actually have
(07:56):
a much wider range of colorreception than dogs, or us,
humans. Birds, for example, areknown to have four types of
cones, those color sensitivereceptors in their eyes, where
we have three. Butterflies havefive, and mantis shrimp have 12
to 16 photoreceptors and caneven see infrared and polarized
(08:19):
light. It's fun to imagine whatthe world would look like if you
had the ability to see even morecolors or more wavelengths of
light. The world might look verydifferent. 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 JaneLindholm, and today we're
(08:40):
talking with Kassia St. Clair,author of The Secret Lives of
Color. She's answering yourcolorful questions.
Freya (08:47):
Hi, I'm Freya. I'm six years old, and how is colors
invented?
Parker (08:52):
My name is Parker. I'm six years old. I live in
Birmingham, Alabama. Whodiscovered color?
Jane (09:04):
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 lightthat bounce off of other
objects. But beyond that,there's also the way we think
and talk about color, and humanshave found lots of ways to make
pigments so we can havedifferent colored toys and
(09:25):
clothes and crayons and paints.
Kassia St. Clair (09:27):
Colors come from lots of different places.
Is it a paint that you have in atube that you paint a picture
with? Or is it a paint that youput on the wall of your house?
Or is it a color of a jumper ora pair of trousers? All of those
colors will come from slightlydifferent places, and most of
(09:50):
the time today, the colors thatwe use will be made in a
factory. There'll becombinations of different kinds
of chemicals, substances thatscientists work with and put
them together in differentcombinations, and they create
something new, but in the oldendays, so, you know, maybe 200
(10:11):
years ago and before then,people weren't generally using
chemicals to make color, or theysometimes were, but more often,
they were using the colors thatare found naturally in the world
around us, and there areactually 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
(10:33):
is different colors. The otherplaces where you might find
color are in insects. So lots ofinsects create color, or indeed,
snails, sea snails create color.
Alaina (10:44):
I'm Elena, and I'm eight years old, and I'm from Alberta,
Canada. How many colors are inthe world?
Addison (10:51):
My name is Addison. I live in Milford, Pennsylvania.
How many colors are in theworld?
Gigi (10:59):
Hi. My name is Gigi. I'm nine years old. I live in Sand
Springs, Oklahoma. Why are thereso many different colors?
Jane (11:07):
There are a couple different ways to think about
this question. Scientists sayhumans can see millions of
distinct color gradations withour eyes. But there's also
another way of looking at itthat has to do with how colors
exist in our minds and ourcultures, and Kassia says that
number is infinite.
Kassia St. Clair (11:26):
The truth is that the number of colors that
there are is everlasting. We'reall over the world, and no
matter where you are in theworld, you'll be thinking about
colors in new ways, and that canchange even over the course of
your lifetime. So, for example,I'm now 40 years old. When I was
growing up, the color avocadogreen had a really specific
(11:47):
meaning. It was seen as reallyold fashioned and and something
a color that had been reallyfashionable in the 1970s. But
now avocado green meanssomething a bit different,
because the world has changedslightly. Avocados have become
much more associated with reallyyoung people with avocado toast,
which is something that you mayor may not enjoy for your your
(12:08):
breakfast or your lunch, andmaybe in ten years time, that
won't be one of the first thingsyou think about. And that
process is happening all thetime. We're constantly thinking
about colors in new ways.
Alan (12:19):
My name is Alan. I am six years old. I live in Brewster,
New York. How do colors gettheir names?
Kassia St. Clair (12:31):
So there's kind of two processes that
happen. There's a kind ofofficial process, by which I
mean a company, for example, acompany that makes paint for
your house or paint for your carmight create a new color, and
then they'll sit in an officeand they'll think about how best
to name it. So for example, if anail polish company is creating
(12:53):
a new red polish at Christmastime, they would probably want
the name to indicate the rednessof the color. But they probably
also want a name that issuggestive of Christmas, and so
they might call it Santa's Cape,for example, but the exact same
color, if it's being released inMay or June, and this might have
(13:14):
a very different name. All of asudden, it might be Apple Red or
something like that. But youalso, again, have this kind of
more open process by whichpeople, ordinary people, aren't
negotiating the namesthemselves. And so a really good
example of this is the colorScarlet, which is a bright shade
of red. Now, Scarlet actually,initially wasn't the name of a
(13:39):
color. It was the name of a typeof cloth, a really beautiful,
very fine, very luxurious, verysoft woolen cloth. And it made
sense, when you were producingsuch a wonderful cloth, to dye
it the most expensive color. Noone wants to buy the most
beautiful cloth in the world andhave it a color that is really
(14:01):
unfashionable, and the colorthat was most fashionable and
expensive at the time whenScarlet was the most beautiful
cloth, was a bright red. Andover time, the color that this
cloth was always dyed borrowedthe name for the type of cloth.
And so Scarlet went from being atype of cloth to a type of red.
Jane (14:20):
So it would almost be as if cotton was a name for a
color, or polyester was a nameof a color that we all identify.
Kassia St. Clair (14:29):
Exactly.
Jane (14:30):
What about the colors that are seen as just sort of your
basic colors of the rainbow? Howdo we get names for things like
red, orange, blue, yellow?
Kassia St. Clair (14:42):
In English and in a lot of other languages, you
have kind of around about thesame number of colors that we
all agree are the kind of basiccolors, red, green, blue. But
that isn't the case for alllanguages. So not all languages
agree on what is a basic color.So some languages only have
three basic color terms. Theywill divide the entire spectrum
(15:07):
of all the colors in the rainbowinto just three. They'll have
light colors, dark colors andred. Other languages and other
countries have, you know, dividethe rainbow up differently. So
for example, in Russia and inthe Russian language, blue isn't
one color, it's divided intotwo. There's light blue and
(15:28):
there's dark blue, siniy andgoluboy. And in Korea, they
divide green up into two,regular green and kind of
yellowy green. And lots oflanguages have added or or
gotten rid of colors over time.So if you were to go to Japan
around about 100 years ago, theywould have the same word for
(15:50):
both blue and green. They nowhave separate words, but that's
pretty recent. So yeah, theanswer is that those basic color
terms depend on what yourculture and what your language
believe is a basic color, andnot all languages agree.
Jane (16:08):
Think about that for a second. If you live in a place
with a language thatdifferentiates between green and
blue, you might walk outside andsay, hey, that car is green and
that other car is blue. But ifyou speak a language that sees
green and blue as one color,your brain will think, look,
there are two blue cars inslightly different shades!
Charlie (16:29):
My name is Charlie. I'm six years old. I'm from Long
Beach, California. Is white acolor or not?
Kassia St. Clair (16:39):
So that's a really good question, and there
is a way that a physicist mightanswer it, and then there's the
way an everyday person wouldanswer it. And a physicist would
tell you that white and blackare not really colors, they're
more expressions of light. So ifyou've got the full spectrum of
visible light, you will perceivethat as white. And if you've got
(17:03):
none of it, you will perceivethat thing as black. But for
ordinary people, we go into ashop and we pick white paint, we
pick a black pair of jeans, andso we experience white and black
as colors. Those are usefulcolor groups, and they are as
(17:23):
valid a color as blue or green.But they're not, these things
aren't perfectly white in theway that a physicist is thinking
of, as an expression of light,or perfectly black, the absence
of light, but they are in thecategory. They are a type of
black. They are a type of white.But it's very, very difficult to
experience pure white or puredark. There's a substance that
(17:48):
was created a few years agocalled vantablack, and that
substance absorbs 99.965% of thevisible spectrum. So what this
looked like is, it's reallyuncanny. Essentially, you could
no longer see any depth in anobject that's coated with the
substance. And what do I mean bythat? So I was shown vantablack
(18:12):
on a piece of crumpled upaluminum or aluminum foil. So
ordinarily, when you see a pieceof foil, you can see that it
has, it's got differenttextures. It's been scrumpled up
a little bit. Different areas ofthe foil reflect light in
different ways. And so you knowthat that object is 3D, you know
(18:32):
it's got bits that are furtheraway from you and closer towards
you. But when you coat that samepiece of foil with vantablack,
which absorbs 99.965% of thelight, all you can see is a
flat, black space. You know thatthat is a piece of crumpled
foil, but you are no longer ableto see any definition in the
(18:55):
foil at all. It just looks flat.And so a round ball looks the
same as a circle. And a carwouldn't like a car. It would
just look like an outline of acar. So it reduces our ability
to perceive depth.
Jane (19:10):
I want to play a prank on my family now. I want to paint
all of my chairs vantablack andthen say, go sit down. And
they'd be like but there'snothing to sit on. Because it
just it wouldn't, it would looklike the shape of an outline of
a chair, but it wouldn't looklike... I wouldn't be able to
see that there is a flat placefor me to sit and a place for me
to put my back. It just lookslike one solid...
Kassia St. Clair (19:31):
Like a blob. Yeah,
Jane (19:33):
that's very cool.
Kassia St. Clair (19:34):
Very cool.
Jane (19:35):
We've learned a lot today about how our eyes and brains
work together to interpret colorand how different people and
cultures and languages thinkabout colors differently. Let's
end with this question fromNoah.
Noah (19:48):
I live in South Salem, New York, and I'm 10 years old. Why
do colors make you feeldifferent emotions?
Kassia St. Clair (19:54):
So what you've got going on is you've got the
way that a kind of the broadestculture feel about a color. So
this is information that we pickup from the world around us. So
that includes adverts that wesee, the language that we're
speaking with, and so on and soforth. So you have really broad
generalizations, like red isoften associated with action, so
(20:20):
things like anger or stop or,you know, really kind of words
that need to be obeyedimmediately, ideas that need to
be obeyed immediately, thingsthat are sudden. And we kind of
take this understanding into ourexperience of the word red. You
then might have more specificthings. You might have something
(20:42):
in your own city. You might havelike the metro. All the metro
stations use red signage, and sothat will probably make you
think of transport, even ifyou're not immediately aware
that that is part of yourunderstanding of the color red.
It will inform yourunderstanding of it. And then
you have, like, what I call thethrow on the, on the sofa. You
(21:04):
then have the kind of your ownpersonal experience of it. How,
how did you grow up? Did youhave toys that were this
particular color when you weregrowing up? Was it your parents'
favorite color? Is it yourfavorite color? Did you choose
to name your dog Scarlet, forexample? And all these things
will act together in ourexperience of how we feel about
(21:26):
a color. But you also have otherthings going on, possibly, and
this is where it becomes reallydifficult, because there is some
evidence, and lots of peoplebelieve that certain colors make
all humans feel a certain way,just because that's how we're
hard wired to behave. So lots ofpeople believe that red, again,
(21:49):
to take the red example, makesus gives us kind of a jolt of
energy and makes us moreaggressive, makes us more angry,
makes us more passionate. Theproblem is, is that it's
absolutely impossible to testfor this in a in a scientific
way, because you cannot remove ahuman being from everything,
(22:09):
from their culture, and so youcan't really completely unpick
what it is that's ingrained inall humans and what it is that
we grow up with and that weunderstand from living in the
world around us.
Jane (22:21):
Right, because sometimes you'll hear people say, if you
want to create a calmingenvironment for anybody who's
going to come into that room,you should paint the room yellow
or blue. I can't even rememberwhich ones, but what you're
saying is we don't know ifthat's because everybody's brain
thinks of that color as acalming color, or if it's
(22:42):
because we think it's calming,because that's what we've grown
up with, and that's what ourculture has told us. There's no
way to figure that outscientifically yet, at any rate.
Kassia St. Clair (22:51):
Yet.
Jane (22:51):
Is there any other story about color that you think just
blow everyone's mind?
Kassia St. Clair (22:57):
Yeah, so I think a lot of people think of
pink as being quite a girlycolor and blue as being quite a
boyish color. But if you go backa hundred years, actually,
people thought of it completelythe opposite way around. People
thought about pink as being acolor for boys and blue as being
(23:18):
a color for girls. And if youlook at the way that they talked
about blue and pink, then theysaid that pink was more decided,
it was more masculine, it waskind of more aggressive, and
blue was more gentle andfeminine. 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 themore was the more feminine
(23:41):
color, and pink was the moremasculine color. And he and his
partner, Gilly, they had kind ofessentially matching walking
sticks. One was blue and one waspink, and my dad's one was the
pink one, and Gilly's one wasthe blue one. And that seemed
entirely natural and normal tothem. And I find it really funny
that in just in a relativelyshort period of time, in just
(24:07):
100 years in the span of onelife, that meaning and
understanding has completelyswitched around. And I think
it's really interesting toimagine, if we all grow up to
100, what color meanings wouldhave completely shifted over in
our lifetime. Will green, youknow, now, I think people think
people think of green as beinglike kind of a natural color,
(24:28):
and to do with nature, maybethat won't be the case in a
hundred years time. Maybe we'llthink of something else. Or
maybe when we think of yellow,we won't immediately think of
sunshine, we'll think ofsomething else. We just don't
know yet. And again, this is whyI love the subject of color.
Jane (24:38):
And honestly, at this point, if you like pink or blue
or green or yellow or whatevercolor you can like whatever
color you want!
Kassia St. Clair (24:45):
Absolutely. Colors are for everyone. And
these meanings that we attach tothem, that sometimes seem so
rigid and like rules, they aregoing to change. They do change.
We can see them changing. And soeven if something seems like a
really hard and fast rule,something that definitely should
be obeyed, just remember theexample of pink and blue. They
(25:06):
feel a certain way now, but thatwasn't always the case, and it
may not always be the case inthe future. Who knows? In ten
years time, twenty years time,this may have all changed.
Jane (25:14):
Thanks to Kassia St. Clair, author of The Secret
Lives of Color, for helping usthink about the universe of
color and how much it's tied tothe way we think about the world
around us. Do you have afavorite color? We'd love to
know and how that color makesyou feel. Send us a video, and
we'll pop it up on our Instagramand YouTube pages. As always, if
(25:36):
you have a question aboutanything, have an adult record.
You asking it on a smartphoneusing an app like voice memos,
then have your adult email thefile to
questions@butwhykids.org. Ourshow is produced by Melody
Bodette, Sarah Baik and me, JaneLindholm at Vermont Public and
distributed by PRX. Our videoproducer is Joey Palumbo, and
(25:56):
our theme music is by LukeReynolds. If you like our show,
please have your adults help yougive us a thumbs up or a review
on whatever podcast platform youuse. It helps other kids and
families find us. We'll be backin two weeks with an all new
episode. Until then, stay curious!
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