Color Science

Introduction

Color is one of the first aspects of clothing that we notice, whether it's on ourselves or on others. As fundamental to style as color is, color science is often not taught due to the highly subjective nature of color perception. While the physical nature of color is scientificaly defined as the range of wavelengths along the electromagnetic spectrum the human eye can pereceive, the psychological nature is dependent on a number of factors that can vary from person to person, including: physiological differences in sensory processing, and individual differences in conscious experiences and learned adaptions.

Despite the subjective nature of color perception, the following page aims to share very basic knowledge about the dimensions that make up color perception. We hope that with this basic knowledge, users can better understand things like personal color analysis to help them in their fashion journey.

Dimensions of color

There are 3 main properties of color that the human eye can detect:
  • Hue which refers to the actual color or shade.
    Example
  • Saturation which refers to how intense or vivid a color appears.
    Example
  • Brightness which refers to the relative lightness or darkness of a particular color, from black (no brightness) to white (full brightness)
    Example
Over time, scientists and artists have developed color systems in order to quantify these properties of color, and to create a structured approach to color notation. The color system that our tutorials and app are based is the Munsell color system.

Munsell Color System

The Munsell color system arranges color such that all three color properites are visually uniform in distance from each other. The scale used for each color property is as follows:
  • Hue There are are 5 principle Munsell hues: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, and 5 intermediate hues: Yellow-Red, Green-Yellow, Blue-Green, Purple-Blue and Red-Purple. Each of these hues are placed at equal intervals around a circle (see below).
  • Value (aka Brightness) The value scale ranges from 0 (pure black) to 10 (pure white). The black, white and grays that occur in between are all considered neutral colors because they have no chroma (chroma=0).
  • Chroma (aka Saturation) Munsell defines chroma as the degree departure of the color from the neutral color of the same value. The chroma scale ranges from 0 (neutral color) to an arbitrary maximum that depends on the hue and value. Colors with high reflectivity can have chroma as high 30. Most colors have a max chroma of around 20.
Interact with the hue circle, value scale, and chroma scales to see how the dimensions affect the resulting colors.

Munsell Hues

Select a hue from the circle.

Let's put your knowledge of color dimensions to the test!

Color Matching Game

How sensitive are your eyes to the color dimensions?
In this riveting game, players must generate matching color blocks by adjusting each of the color dimension scales.

Color Difference Game

How well do you know the differences amongst the color dimnesions?
In this riveting game, players must generate matching color blocks by adjusting each of the color dimension scales.