Mary Johnson Consulting: What color is it?
On Green:
Back in the 1980s, I worked in a physical chemistry lab where we did a lot of measurements using lasers (for Raman characterization and pressure measurement using ruby luminescence). We used argon ion lasers and both colors the lasers were tuned to were beautiful.
Sometimes a laser would be tuned to 488 nm, which is a
glowing turquoise blue like some of the finest
One consequence of all that green in a darkened lab in my
past is that I rarely see other hues as genuinely green. I see them as
yellowish green or brownish green or sometimes bluish green. Even many fine
emeralds look too bluish for me…And in some lights (e.g., fluorescent office
light), I don’t see desaturated yellow-greens as green at all. Instead, I see
them as yellows or oranges with a blue wash overlaying the color. I once
described an “olive” diamond—somewhere in the green, brown, and gray
intersection—as bluish violetish yellow; and
I recently purchased a Macbeth Judge II viewing box and a set of Munsell color chips for accurate color determination. One of the items I looked at was a recent (circa 2000) Fulper Copper-Dust tile that I saw, even in sunlight and incandescent light, as orange with a blue overlay. It was instructive to see which colors matched when I compared it to the Munsell chips.
The copper dust tile itself measured between 7.5YR3/6 and 7.5YR4/8 (strong brown, according to http://www.december.com/html/spec/colorucl.html; DAACS dark muted orange to medium intense orange).
The “blued” area was between 7.5Y4/4 and 7.5Y3/4 (olive; or DAACS medium-to-dark muted yellow): nowhere near blue.
(By the way, another place one does not see genuine, excellent green is on TV sets and computer monitors. Got green?)