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Less Than 1% of People Got a Perfect Score on This Color Test. How Will You Do?

By Sara Barnes on June 6, 2019

How well can you see color? It's one thing to differentiate between red and blue, but observing the nuances of individual hues is another story—and often much trickier. To see just how challenging this can be, UK-based vision care company Lenstore has created a short online game to test your abilities, requiring you to choose and arrange shades of color.

While this might sound easy, Lenstore reveals that it’s hard to ace this test. Less than 1% of the 2,000 people the company initially surveyed scored a perfect 10 out of 10 questions correct. The most common score was six out of 10 correct, or 60%. Additionally, sex and age have something to do with it. Women tend to do better than men, scoring an average of 57.7% while the guys are at 53.8%. The ability to perceive color declines with age and peaks when we’re in our early thirties. Those in the 31 to 35-year-old range scored around 60% correct while folks over 76 years old were much lower, tallying 30 to 40% right.

To make things even more complicated, language also affects how we differentiate between hues. “The way we talk about color plays an important role in how we perceive it,” Lenstore explains. “English didn’t have a word for ‘orange’ until two centuries after the fruit of the same name arrived in Europe. Before then, the color was called ‘yellow-red.’ ” Likewise, there are two categories in which Russian speakers place blue. “Something is never ‘blue’ in Russian, it’s either ‘siniy’ (dark blue) or ‘goluboy’ (light blue). Multiple experiments suggest these words influence our perception of color.”

Take the color test below and see how well you do. Good luck!