The human eye is able to perceive more shades of green than any other color.
But, just how many shades of green are there? Well, as Maude Newton so eloquently explained in her 2012 NY Times post - it's not as simple as that. You might recall “The Dress” from 2015: a seemingly simple dress posted on Tumblr that sparked debates across the country. Was it blue? Was it black? Was it gold? Ah, don’t get us started! Color is perceived differently from one person to the next. What might appear green to one person might be considered blue by another. In fact "color" can even be defined differently from one people group to the next.
Newton recalls a BBC documentary about the Himba tribe suggesting the way we see color is based upon our description of color.
"The Himba tribe from northern Namibia, for instance, does not classify green and blue separately, the way Westerners do, but it does differentiate among various shades of what we call green. And when tested, members of the tribe, who are likely to have trouble with blue-green distinctions that most Westerners make easily, readily distinguish among greens that tend to look the same to Western eyes.
While the English language has 11 separate color categories — red, green, blue, yellow, black, white, grey, pink, orange, purple and brown — the Himba have only five. That may be because their environment does not include as many gradations. “Without the full range of saturated stimuli that can be artificially produced,” one team of scholars speculates, “traditional communities may have no need of the finer categorical distinctions” and thus have no reason to “refine their color lexicon further.” In other words, a Himba grandmother probably does not have a cerise suit set."
So first you must decide what is green and what is blue. Technically, there are an infinite number of colors (many of them can't even be perceived by the human eye). But one colorist has stated that the number of greens we can perceive with the human eye is somewhere between thousands and one million.
When we decided on a blue-green as the third color for our stainless steel water bottle we didn’t realize just how many options we’d have to choose from. But thankfully, we made our choice before going through all 1,000,000 swatches. But this color wasn't chosen at random. There is powerful symbolism behind the two married colors that create teal: blue and green, often associated with the thirst quenching properties of water and the progression of growth. Together these two colors create teal, culminating in a refreshing renewal.
So next time you’re lying under a cloudless sky stretched out across a blanket of green grass take a sip of refreshing renewal straight from an Elemental stainless steel water bottle.
Click HERE to order your teal stainless steel water bottle today!
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