Move over Pantone, a group of scientists said they have found a new color that very few, make that extremely few, people have ever seen.
It is called “olo” and it is a shade of blue-green, according to the BBC.
The U.S.-based scientists discovered it by doing something most of us are told not to do: shining a laser into a person’s eyes.
They used the laser pulses to stimulate specific cells in the retina, leading some of the study’s participants to say they saw a blue-green color that they hadn’t seen before.
But not all agree that “olo” really exists, saying that the alleged discovery is “open to argument.”
The experiment was limited, only conducted on five people, including Professor Ren Ng, the co-author of the study published in the journal Science Advances. The other participants, three other men and one woman, all had normal color vision and three of the subjects, including Ng wrote the article.
Ng, who is an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkley, said olo was “more saturated than any color that you can see in the real world,” Smithsonian Magazine reported.
The way the retina works is that light stimulates the cones in the eye, but the cones, called M, L and S, overlap. The study used the laser to only hit the M cones, sending a signal to the brain that cannot be done naturally.
Professor John Barbur was not involved in the study, admits that and zeroing in on the specific cone was a “technological feat,” the alleged discovery of a new color was “open to argument.”
Barbur, a vision scientist at City St. George’s University of London, explained that stimulating a cone may make a color deeper, but it isn’t necessarily a new color, the BBC reported.
The researchers and other scientists believe that the research could help people with red-green color blindness, New Scientist reported.
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