Lakeside Poll: Color

What is your favorite color? What color do you see the famous dress as? Do you know anyone else with the same answers as you? I wanted to get a consensus on color from the Lakeside community, so I created a survey to find out (fill out the monthly survey in the Daily to add your own opinion). Thank you so much to the over 130 people who filled out the survey for this article!

The first question I asked was pretty basic: what’s your favorite color? Almost 50% of you chose… blue! This answer was unsurprising, according to Live Science, Popular Mechanics, and other sites. Blue is liked around the world, also according to these sites. The site Artsy says that so many people like blue because blue is connected to so many neutral or positive things, like the sky and water. Blue can also have a calming effect, so it makes sense that over 49 of you chose it as your favorite color.

The next question was, naturally, what’s your least favorite color? I got a lot of really varied responses for this one, ranging from “pink” to “air pollution”. The most disliked color was brown, (also the same as nationwide data from Live Science), but a surprising second (at least to me) was orange! 

“Orange is my least favorite color because it is very bright and busy,” said one 6th grader. They elaborated that they thought it was a very loud color, and it generally just raised feelings of dislike for them.

I then asked people to rate a dark red color (shown here) from 1-5, with 5 being the best and 1 being the worst. Many people were surprisingly ambivalent about this color, with over half of you rating it a 3 out of 5. I decided to include rating red in this poll because red has a lot of connections ranging from very negative to very positive, so it’s interesting to know that many people at Lakeside don’t have too many strong associations with this color (or that they still don’t particularly like or dislike the color).

The last question was the classic, timeless question: what color is that dress? For those of you who don’t know, “The Dress” was a viral phenomenon, posted in 2015 by Cecilia Bleasdale. It wasn’t originally meant to be an illusion, but a debate quickly sparked and grew into a major internet argument of the color of the dress. Some saw it as white and gold, but some saw it as blue and black (and smaller percentages of people saw it as other colors).

Out of all the questions I asked, the most surprising one was definitely this one. There was a huge contrast with data from a study done by the Journal of Vision, a scientific journal studying vision. That study found that 57% of people saw it as blue and black, 30% saw it as white and gold, 11% saw it as blue and brown, and 2% saw it as something else. However, in this survey, 65.2% saw it as white and gold, 12.9% saw it as blue and black, 8.3% saw it as blue and brown, and 13.6% saw it as “other”. Some of the most common “other” responses were ‘blue and gold’, ‘orange and white’, and ‘brown and white’. (Some of you also put the scientific answer, ‘it depends on what lighting you’re in when you first see it’).

In conclusion, the Lakesiders who replied to the survey had very similar answers to nationwide surveys for the first two questions, but very different for the last two. There was a surprising amount of agreement on almost all of the questions; every question had at least a quarter of responders agreeing. Colors usually have lots of associations, which is a big factor into your favorite color and how you feel about colors. 

Check the monthly survey in the Daily to get your responses into the Leo, and hopefully you learned something about color perception today.