Sunday, 19 October 2014

Let's colour!

The colours are such a normal thing in our life that sometimes we even don't pay attention to their presence. We can not only see them but also feel them by feeling their temperature. On average a human can see 16 million colours but women are better at recognizing them - the statistics say that 8% of men and only 0.5% of women have problems distinguishing colours. The perception and recognition is only the first step to say that we know some colours because we also use them to describe characteristics of other things so we have to know how they are called. This is where the game begins!

In daily talks we name the colours intuitively saying that they are warm or cold, bright or dark, intensive or pale. We use the references to the objects we know, for example we say: That book has the same colour as your new jacket. Besides a few (comparing to 16 millions) colours that everyone can easily name, like red, blue, black or orange, there are colours with more complicated names that are no so evident to all of us, f.ex. celadon, turquoise, sienna, cyan or crimson.

There are situations where we can't omit giving names to colours because there is a real need to distinguish one concrete tone of blue between ten of them. I want to show you how funny solutions can be. Recently I was skimming over a catalogue with cosmetics and I realized that many colours of nail polishes have ridiculous names.

There are some that still contain a name of colour and give an idea of how they may look like. You still might not know what is the shade of Orange You Quick but it tells you that it is some kind of orange. The same thing is with On Point Blue, Twilight blue, Fast Time Teal, Divine Lime or All Khakied Out. All of them work on your imagination and you almost can say if you would like them on your nails or not. Now try to guess what colours theese can be: Swift Sherbet, Vamp it, Lure, Enchanted Siren, Naked truth, Untamed, Lioness, Peek A Boo, Vixen or my two favourites - Shipwreck and Barely There. Any ideas?