Eye of the beholder
Evan Zabawski | TLT From the Editor October 2012
Pumpkin seed oil exemplifies a unique characteristic.
This phenomenon is related to the physiochemical properties of the substance and the physiological response of the human visual system to color.
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Color coding plays an important role in the workplace, whether it is used to differentiate piping in a plant, secondary lubricant containers or even different copies of administrative forms. However, I have often suggested to customers that they administer color blindness tests to their employees before they implement any such program.
Statistically speaking, upwards of 10% of the male population and only about 0.4% of the female population has some form of color blindness. So in a male-dominant group of workers, there is a very good chance of finding at least one worker who may have trouble distinguishing certain colors.
I like to jokingly generalize that most men are color blind compared to women, suggesting that boys grow up with the eight-crayon box of Crayolas, and girls grow up with the 120 crayon box. To see evidence of this, watch a couple choose paint at the hardware store and listen to their descriptions.
This summer I repainted my in-laws’ bedroom from an orangey-brown to a pale, off white blue. It was a dramatic makeover, and I wasn’t sure my mother-in-law would be totally satisfied with her selection. I felt she chose too light of a color because she was so displeased with the original, darker color.
Luckily she was satisfied, but when she commented that the color wasn’t exactly what she envisioned, her reasoning was not how light the color was but rather that it was “a bit more green” than she was expecting. I had to look a lot harder at the walls to see what she was talking about.
Now the men reading the above description could probably envision the original color and the new color, to their satisfaction, based on my description, but the women would be more in tune if I said the original color was pumpkin spice latte and the new color was light sea foam blue. Those colors don’t come in the eight-crayon box.
Perhaps the perception of color is not as gender-based as I have portrayed it, and may be due to a completely different effect: dichromatism. Dichromatism is defined as “a phenomenon where the hue of the color in materials or solutions are dependent on both the concentration of the absorbing substance and the depth or thickness of the medium traversed.”
This phenomenon is related to the physiochemical properties of the substance and the physiological response of the human visual system to color and was first explained only five years ago. An excellent example of this can be seen in Styrian pumpkin seed oil, which appears green in a layer up to 0.7-mm thick and appears red in a thicker layer.
The technical explanation for this involves both the Beer- Lambert law, which states the proportion of light transmitted at a given wavelength decreases exponentially with thickness when viewing through the colored substance, and the sensitivity of the three types of cone photoreceptors in the eye of the viewer. The simple reality is that a single drop of the oil may appear red but appear to turn green when spread out.
There is a potential that disagreement on color doesn’t simply rely on the gender of the beholder but could also be dependent on the thickness of the substance being observed, depending on its dichromatic properties. At least that’s why I will say my mother-in-law’s new paint looks nothing but blue to me; the thickness of the spots we are each observing must be different.
Evan Zabawski, CLS, is a reliability specialist. You can reach him at evan.zabawski@gmail.com.