Beyond the Crayon Box, How Culture, Science, and Technology Shape Color
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme:
Crayons, Clocks, and Spelling Tests: The Human Stories Behind Everyday School Subjects
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,400 words, an estimated 5-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re uncovering the hidden stories behind everyday school subjects — those lessons so embedded in classrooms that we may rarely stop to ask: Where did this come from?
We’ve explored spelling, counting, timekeeping, and mapmaking.
This week, we turn to color — or more specifically, how we learn to name and understand it.
Maybe you remember opening a fresh box of crayons — sometimes a pack of eight. Each wax crayon wrapped in a paper label, printed with a single, clear term: black, brown, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, green. Those labels — crayons held in hand — felt like objective truth.
But color is not fixed. It’s cultural. We are taught to label and categorize something that exists as a spectrum — a lived experience filtered through language, biology, memory, and meaning.
So, what even is color?
How do we come to see and name something that isn’t fixed — but changes with environment, language, and time?
And how have — and do — different cultures, across time and place, experience, describe, and teach color in unique and similar ways?
What is Color, Really? The Science of Light and Perception
Color begins with light. Light is energy.
More specifically, light is part of the “electromagnetic spectrum,” which includes all types of electromagnetic radiation, from radio waves to gamma-rays. A portion of this spectrum is visible light, made up of different wavelengths. For many of us, our eyes detect the wavelengths, and our brains interpret them as color.
Shorter wavelengths carry more energy, and are usually seen as colors we’ve been taught to call violet or blue. Longer wavelengths carry less energy and are interpreted as red and orange. The human eye perceives color based on how objects absorb and reflect light waves.
But color is more than just light. Our experience of color depends not only on how our eyes detect light, but also on our own sensory abilities — including variations like color blindness or different ways of perceiving the world. With this lens, color is shaped by many things: biology, environment, culture, and language.
Color is a spectrum — it does not arrive as fixed, distinct categories.
Humans have segmented or sliced up the spectrum and categorized it in different ways. How we name and classify color is subjective; it’s a human invention.
Understanding this — that color is a spectrum shaped by biology, culture, and language — reminds us to embrace diverse ways of seeing and naming the world.
It encourages curiosity, inclusivity, and respect for different experiences, whether teaching color in schools or creating community in everyday life.
Naming Colors: From Dark and Light, to Red, and Beyond
Exploring colors seems to be a universal human trait, but naming color is a cultural act.
Early humans created pigments from what surrounded them: red ochre, burnt charcoal, plant-based ingredients like indigo, and more.
It’s widely believed that these colors weren't just decorative — they likely carried meaning, marked rituals, signaled identity, and told stories on stone walls, objects, and bodies. (You might remember the Blombos Cave in South Africa — where we find ochre markings were made over 70,000 years ago!)
But how many colors does a language or culture name? How is it decided where a color ends and another begins?
Across time and place, as human beings have carved the color spectrum in distinct — yet sometimes surprisingly similar — ways. In some languages, there are just a few basic color terms. In others, there are many. And not all of those names map easily onto the English “rainbow” — or ROYGBIV — that some of us may have learned in school.
Historical linguists have identified a common pattern: many languages or cultures tend to name color terms in a somewhat predictable order. The first color words to emerge tend to describe dark and light, or words close to black and white. The next? Almost always red. Then yellow or green. And sometimes blue, and so on.
This pattern — dark/light, followed by red, then others — isn’t universal, but it’s remarkably widespread. Some research suggests red may be especially distinct visually and emotionally, as its symbolic meaning varies across culture and history.
In other words, even when we perceive color similarly, we may name it, group it, and assign meaning to it in different ways — shaped by language, environment, culture.
Color In the World
If color is a spectrum, then how we divide, name, and relate to that spectrum varies widely, though we may inherit a framework without questioning it much, or realizing that others may see it differently.
In Russian, for example, there are two distinct words for what English speakers would call “blue”: goluboy (light blue) and siniy (dark blue). Russian speakers tend to perceive those colors as more different than English speakers do — a reflection of how language can sharpen or blur distinctions we might otherwise overlook.
Among the Himba people of Namibia, who speak OtjiHimba, colors are grouped differently compared to English. One word, buru, captures what English labels as both “blue” and “green.” There isn’t a specific word for blue, but there are many nuanced terms for green. One study found that OtjiHimba speakers could easily distinguish between subtle shades of green — distinctions many English speakers, or “Westerners,” would “struggle to differentiate.”
In the Philippines, linguists have studied Indigenous languages spoken by communities on Mindoro Island. In the Honunó’o language, for example, scholars have noted four primary color terms: darkness, lightness, redness, and greenness. But these terms communicate more than color — they also convey physical qualities, described as existing “on a spectrum of light versus dark, strength vs weakness, and wetness versus dryness.” Such categories reflect ways of living deeply attuned to the forested environment of Mindoro Island.
For the Alangan, also on Mindoro, three basic color terms are used: black, white, red. But this doesn’t mean the perception of color itself is oversimplified. As linguist Shi Yang nootes: “Although the Alangan have only three basic color terms… these terms, including their derivatives, are fully capable of describing accurately their natural environment. These color terms also articulate a great deal of noncolor information, such as whether a plant or fruit is ripe or not, can be eaten or not, growing well or not, or good for humankind or not.”
Color, then, is not only a visual experience, but a cultural one — encoded with relationships between people, place, and the knowledge woven through both.
From Pigment to Pixel, How Technology Shapes Our Experience of Color
From pigment to pixel, the way we experience and assign meaning to color is continually evolving — shaped not only by biology and culture, but now also by global technology.
As mentioned, early humans created color by grinding natural pigments from the earth — a practice that continues in many communities today. In classrooms, many students still learn about the primary and secondary colors through paint: starting with red, yellow, and blue. But much of the color we interact with is reproduced digitally, through screens and printers — systems built on frameworks that translate hues into codes, pixels, and ink.
Screens, for example, use red, green, and blue (RGB) as primary colors because light, not pigment, is the medium. Printing relies on cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) — colors designed for layering inks.
These systems work to standardize color across tools and platforms so that what’s created in one place appears consistent elsewhere.
Today, technology lets us reproduce and share color instantly — from millions of pixels on digital devices to precise ink shades on paper. This global spread of color may expand the palette available to us and offer accessibility tools that can support people with color blindness, and other sensory differences, engage with color in new ways. In this sense, if used with intention, forms of technology may foster inclusion.
Whether through pixels or pigment — by picking up a stylus, a wax crayon, or crushing pigment with our own hands — our relationship to color will likely continue to shift, reminding us that color is not a fixed fact, but a shared, evolving experience.
How you see color may not be how your neighbor or the student in your class sees it, or even how your ancestors saw it.
In an increasingly globalized world, how can we continue to expand our palette, while still holding onto our unique — both cultural and individual — voices?