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Has the world become less colourful?

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Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#71

Post by somebodythere »

junga wrote: post #56
AmericanChopper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason for that seems obvious to me. Grey, steel, white and black will work in basically every kitchen. If you want a more colorful pallet in any room in your house, then you need to put a lot more thought into planning it. I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that.

> I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that. But they were in the past? I don't know but I wonder why this might have changed.

No, I think people in the past probably just had a weaker preference for designs that go together in color and style.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#72

Post by DoingIsLearning »

Macha wrote: post #31
ThePadawan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be a self-perpetuating problem. Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white. (I read somewhere [so take this with a grain of salt] that this effect happens with marble kitchen countertops: not that many homeowners actually like them, but they believe that potential buyers might, so an overproportional amount of…

> Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white. There's definitely location/cultural variety here, people would worry a white car wouldn't sell, due to the increased visibility of dirt and scratches, so only gets 5% of sales here. The top colours here are silver (24%), black (22%) and blue (17%, mostly darker shades). I'…

> I'm not sure why silver cars escape the stigma of white cars here since they have the same issues, but they do.

Most cars ads show off new models in some variation of metalic grey. Perhaps this creates a subliminal impression in how people perceive metalic grey as an 'elegant' car colour.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#73

Post by DoingIsLearning »

arketyp wrote: post #4

Maybe because we have such rich color reproduction in screens we feel the need to have the rest of our surroundings take on a more neutral stance. In fact this reflects the screens such as they are "blank canvases" that take on whatever content deemed fit for the present purpose or mood.

In my opinion it's more about risk aversion.

It is difficult to use a lot of color and be 'tasteful' it is a lot easier to use neutral colors even if the end result is dull. People are too afraid of being tacky so they stay in the nordic ikea safe zone.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#74

Post by BrandoElFollito »

avar wrote: post #46
thematrixturtle wrote: post #34

There is a famous if possibly apocryphal study where random people were asked to rate various toaster colors, and everybody swooned over lime green and hot pink and whatnot. After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.

Quoted post unavailable.

If you want to be pedantic, there is no such thing as a "color". There are light waves with a frequency that hit a highly non-linear detector (our eye) and what comes from that is analyzed by your brain to put a label such as "red".

What you see is different from what I see (not to mention that I am a daltonist) - and none of these are standardized.

We are used to colors and this is why we label them.

So "chrome" is absolutely a color, like "salmon" and "fuschia" is, or "gold" or "brownish"

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#75

Post by phil21 »

I've been commenting over the past year or two on the color of new cars recently. It seems "security contractor grey" of various shades is all the rage the past few years.

My pet theory is that car colors tend to reflect society's mood, and we've been in a dour one for some time.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#76

Post by towaway15463 »

somebodythere wrote: post #71
junga wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that. But they were in the past? I don't know but I wonder why this might have changed.

No, I think people in the past probably just had a weaker preference for designs that go together in color and style.

That seems unlikely. Look at fashion and decor magazines from the past and you see lots of lively colours that are coordinated. If you go house hunting and see a couple houses that haven’t been updated for decades they have a definite palette.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#78

Post by pflanze »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #63
pflanze wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> re-emission in valance holes Are you talking about single-colour LEDs? Since white LEDs use a "phosphor", just like fluorescent lights, that convert blue or UV light. In fact I thought that the phosphors used by LEDs today are much better than those used by fluorescent lights. Maybe you're talking about RGB lights, which combine separate reg, green and blue LEDs so that the colour mix can be changed. But even then…

> white LEDs use a "phosphor", just like fluorescent lights Wow. I didn't know that. So I guess the junction actually emits UV which is converted to visible spectrum? Does that mean they're bad for your eyes if some UV leaks out? How I thought it worked is that different doping materials are blended in the junction to get a mix of frequencies. Maybe that's impossible. And yes, sure for RGB clusters the spacing is obv…

> Does that mean they're bad for your eyes

As far as I can see from distributors, most white LEDs today are using a blue light emitter, so there's no issue with UV. When using white LEDs that use an UV emitter, some glass covering is needed to catch the remainder, from what I've heard from a friend (I've never actually built an LED lamp myself). But it appears that blue LEDs are much more efficient than UV ones and that probably explains why normally white LEDs use blue emitters.

More information here (confirming what I just wrote): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#White

PS. I've been looking into these things to some extent because of all the issues with commercial LED lamps (short life, AC or PWM flickering, colour rendering), and have been thinking of mixing more LEDs together (various single colour ones together with various phosphor-employing ones) so as to mix a more ideal spectrum myself, but I haven't gotten around to actually executing that plan.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#79

Post by MgB2 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #63
pflanze wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> re-emission in valance holes Are you talking about single-colour LEDs? Since white LEDs use a "phosphor", just like fluorescent lights, that convert blue or UV light. In fact I thought that the phosphors used by LEDs today are much better than those used by fluorescent lights. Maybe you're talking about RGB lights, which combine separate reg, green and blue LEDs so that the colour mix can be changed. But even then…

> white LEDs use a "phosphor", just like fluorescent lights Wow. I didn't know that. So I guess the junction actually emits UV which is converted to visible spectrum? Does that mean they're bad for your eyes if some UV leaks out? How I thought it worked is that different doping materials are blended in the junction to get a mix of frequencies. Maybe that's impossible. And yes, sure for RGB clusters the spacing is obv…

For normal lighting LEDs the diode itself usually emits blue light (440-460 nm). Most of the blue photons are then absorbed by the phosphor or phosphors and reemitted at longer wavelengths (yellow-green to red). This converted light mixed with the remaining blue light gives the white color impression.

So no UV, although there are some concerns about the hazards of blue light. But if you ask me, you get much more blue light onto your retinas by just going outside on a sunny day than you'd ever get from normal LED lighting.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#80

Post by amalcon »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #22

An explanation might be LED lighting. Sunlight, candle-light and resistive filament lights (incandescent) have a broadband spectrum. Through most of history we've viewed the world lit by these sources. Moving to fluorescent lights causes spectral quantisation as the frequencies are due to electronic band transitions in the gas. The phosphor absorbs and re-emits energy in different bands that fills out the spectrum bu…

This seems like it would be pretty testable. We still take a lot of photos under sunlight. If light sources are the cause, then the effect should disappear if we look only at such photos.
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