10 Amazing Facts About Color

Colors from brilliant to beige surround us, but how much do we really know about them?

Here are 10 amazing facts about color.

Number 10. Men and women see it differently. Females are more adept at detecting slight differences between closely related hues, while males tend to see them as being the same. Women have also been shown to be better equipped linguistically when it comes to describing them.

Number 9. Blue is the world's favorite color. Survey after survey has found that typically about half of those asked say they prefer it. That's up to four times more love than the colors that end up in second place, like purple and green, get.



Number 8. The fear of colors has many names. Chromophobia and chromatophobia both describe the general disorder, while fears of many specific colors each have their own label. For example, cyanophobics are struck by feelings of terror when they see blue. Chlorophobics are afraid of greens.

Number 7. Rainbows are much more than they appear. While they look like bands of a handful of colors to us, they actually contain more hues than there are stars in the sky. It's the perception abilities of our eyes that limit the rainbow's range.

Number 6. Bulls aren't really angered by red. What they're responding to when the colored cape is flashed in front of them is the motion. Studies show they get just as worked up by the waving of flags in white and blue.

Number 5. Cats see in color. It's unclear where the belief that cats have black and white vision came from, but regardless of its origin, the information is wrong. They observe the world in color, the hues just aren't as bright as those observed by humans.

Number 4. Colorblindness is an overstatement. For nearly every person who is afflicted by it, it's only colors in a given range that are affected. Most common differentiation problems occur with red, blue and green. There are cases of a complete inability to see color, but they're quite rare.

Number 3. Yellow is noticed first. In tests involving color and peripheral vision, the sunny color was noticed 1 and a quarter times faster than even attention grabbing red. That's why school buses are yellow.

Number 2. Blue is best for gamers. A study in Japan showed that those who binged on video games in a blue environment had a more regular heartbeat than the people who played next to yellow or red walls.

Number 1. Supermarket meat is usually artificially bright red in color. About 70 percent of what people see on the shelves has been treated with carbon monoxide. It reacts with the blood and imparts a vibrant, fresh-from-the-butcher color.