Before Blue

Everything here moves in OkLCh — a perceptual space where a step of lightness, chroma or hue looks like a step of the same size to the eye, not merely to the machine. It is described in the W3C CSS Color Module Level 4, alongside Oklab.

The premise of colour “before naming” is poetic, not physiological. Nothing on this page lies outside human vision. What differs is where a language chooses to cut the continuum: Gibson and colleagues found both real cross-linguistic variation and a recurring structure in how cultures name what they see — warm colours named earlier, and more finely, than cool ones.