It is possible to see something close (how close I don't know) by saturating the S & M cones instead of avoiding them. Wikipedia refers to these as 'chimerical colors':
In ~2016 on the chan someone posted a completely unhinged post about this "bleen" "grue" color that nobody could see. it's probably lost to the ages now, but I remember it.
I'm color blind. I do see a somewhat different, brighter color, but it isn't particularly different from normal colors. That's just me (and my fellow aberrants)?
The fun part is the big red dot on the green background animation. Even before clicking it, as my eyes dart across it, small dark blue/black electric arc like shapes manifest all around the edges of the circle either reaching to the edge of the square or curving back to the circle like solar flares. I am red-green colorblind too.
These demos really drive home the chemical / biological part of visual perception to me. As I perceive these strange new colors I can almost feel the chemical processes occurring in my cones.
This is heroin for the eyes. Once the hit is over you want to take another one and if you don't it'll take ten minutes or so until the "real" world won't feel like a bleached sepia picture any more.
weird shit that happen kinda happen to me a lot. i felt always that maybe my brain was malfunctioning.
i still kinda do, because it just happen at random when i am outside. sometimes, usually in bright morning light, sunny morning. no i dont look at the sun, yes mostly its visible looking at the blue of the sky.
last time i had it while in 1 on 1 with my manager. it took a lot of struggle not to try and rub my eye or tell her i was seeing this weird rainbow snake floating around.
overloaded cones, hopefully thats not some indication of something bad but just 'tired eyes'.
If you are interested in "imaginary" colors, the gamut is actually well-specified, and (I hope it is appropriate to comment) that I made a visualization where you can drag a selection thumb over the gamut to see the "simulated" version of that color. Also include it is a 12-step contrast-sensitive color palette generator for said imaginary colors, which would allow you to make websites and (say) vscode themes using entirely imaginary colors! https://docs.moment.dev/d/hausdorff/2zmqjlmldchela29xvbzlbki...
I've always taken it to be that the color is unique to the situation/viewer -- a sort of pearlescent void-color that can't be described in any known language, but which just Is. More a physical phenomenon than an actual color, but distinctly hued somehow.
They also make the orangiest orange paint, the yellowest yellow, the pinkest pink, etc. At a certain point I have to wonder how much these are accurate descriptors of the paint colors vs arbitrary made up marketing nonsense.
Note that there has been controversy for the last few years around Culture Hustle not fulfilling orders and doing other sketchy things. Just a heads up.
I had ordered something from them and it took me initiating a chargeback for them to ship anything at all. The product that arrived was of terrible quality, and
their customer support email is completely useless as well, any email gets a canned "your email is very important to us!" style response. My bank denied my second chargeback request because they had technically shipped something.
Someone is trying to recreate "the seven colors of the earthly rainbow and the three extra colors you only get in Heaven" (from Scott Alexander's UNSONG).
Reminds me a bit of a Greg Egan story from Instantiation called Seventh Sight. Kids with artificial eyes hack them to see colors and spectrum not perceptible by humans.
> Olo was discovered on April 18, 2025 by scientists at UC Berkeley.[1][3] The color is named after its theoretical LMS color space coordinates (0, 1, 0), which spells "olo" in leet speak.[4][3]
I presume "loo" and "ool" are in-gamut? What hex values?
703 nm laser is almost “loo”, and 417 nm is almost “ool”. Searching those wavelengths gives me #FF0000 and #6400FF. Loo is all red and ool is all violet.
Since colors are an activation of rods and cones, could we simulate them by stimulating the eye nerves directly? Not necessarily to see new colors, but to replicate the experience of sight? If we managed that, wouldn't it feel exactly the same as seeing something in nature that itches the back of the eye so nicely? I suppose this is entering the brain interface territory.
Ultraviolet is prnamed that because of the Latin meaning of ultra as "beyond", as it's "beyond violet" in the spectrum, same as infrared is "below red".
Having read this comment from today detailing variance in the default Windows 95 background (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329282), I'm imagining Olo would be your wallpaper if "257 colors" could be supported.
> It’s not that people in the past couldn’t see blue. Indeed, there were several words which could refer to things we would call blue today, but these words could also describe things we’d assign to other colours too, especially grey and green.
> Funding: This work was supported by a Hellman Fellowship (R.N.), FHL Vive Center Seed Grant (R.N.), Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant FA9550-20-1-0195 (J.F., C.W., W.S.T., A.R., and R.N.), Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant FA9550-21-1-0230 (J.F., H.K.D., C.W., A.E.B., S.R.H., V.P.P., W.S.T., R.S., A.R., and R.N.), National Institutes of Health grant R01EY023591 (A.E.B., B.P.S., P.T., J.E.V., W.S.T., A.R., and R.N.), National Institutes of Health grant R01EY029710 (V.P.P. and R.S.), National Institutes of Health grant U01EY032055 (V.P.P., R.S., and A.R.), and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface (R.S.).
No, because that's not understanding what this technology, and our cone cells, are doing.
For example, yellow has a wavelength of ~580nm. When that wavelength enters our eyes it activates both the M and the L cone cells, with the L slightly more. That differential activation between the two types of cells gives us the experience of yellow.
Blue actually activates all our cone cells, with S the most and a tiny bit of M and L.
What this technology does is selectively activate only the M cone cells.
There is no possible wavelength that activates only the M cone cells, because the combined activation spectrum of the S and L
cone cells overlaps the entirely of the M spectrum. There's nothing natural that can enter our eyes and activate M without also activating L and/or S.
Therefore no one can ever have had the experience of having only their M cone cells activated with anything in the natural world. It can only have been done with this technology.
As for the experience of seeing olo, the qualia, that's almost arbitrary. The authors originally thought it was going to be the "greenest green" but it wasn't really. It wasn't possible to predict what the qualia would be, because the brain has never had that experience. For all they knew they might not have seen anything, because the brain could have just thrown up it's hands at this nonsense signal. Instead they happened to experience this teal-like color. But that wasn't a priori obvious. It's just the brain struggling to apply an experience to nonsense.
It is similar to tiring out the S and L cone cells and then looking away as you say elsewhere -- the authors mention that in the long-form article in The New Yorker -- but this is much clearer and more saturated.
You stare the some shape of 0xFF0030 and then close yores eyes and the inverted color appears.
So, the cover of R.E.M.'s 1988 record titled Green, which is actually orange. You're supposed to stare at it, then close your eyes, and you see the album cover as it's intended to be viewed.
The word "officially" is the massive wiggle-word here.
Only one person on Earth has officially seen the color of my coffee mug. Send me Venmo for $10, and I'll officiate your viewing of the attached JPG....
Except that this requires extremely specialized equipment to individually trigger specific cone cells in your eyes, so I expect they have a pretty damn good idea of who has seen this and who hasn't.
It is possible to see something close (how close I don't know) by saturating the S & M cones instead of avoiding them. Wikipedia refers to these as 'chimerical colors':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_co...
Demonstration of this: https://dynomight.net/colors/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44594808)
Love this - references one of my favorite ever optical experiences Eclipse of Titan
https://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/ipage-et.html
BTW olo was not discovered in 2025
In ~2016 on the chan someone posted a completely unhinged post about this "bleen" "grue" color that nobody could see. it's probably lost to the ages now, but I remember it.
Are you sure that wasn't referencing "grue" from this philosophical thought experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction
I'm color blind. I do see a somewhat different, brighter color, but it isn't particularly different from normal colors. That's just me (and my fellow aberrants)?
The fun part is the big red dot on the green background animation. Even before clicking it, as my eyes dart across it, small dark blue/black electric arc like shapes manifest all around the edges of the circle either reaching to the edge of the square or curving back to the circle like solar flares. I am red-green colorblind too.
These demos really drive home the chemical / biological part of visual perception to me. As I perceive these strange new colors I can almost feel the chemical processes occurring in my cones.
This is heroin for the eyes. Once the hit is over you want to take another one and if you don't it'll take ten minutes or so until the "real" world won't feel like a bleached sepia picture any more.
I saw the blue rim, but I didn't notice much effect on how the real world looked like after. But then, I'm red-green colourblind.
tbf it's more like methylamine + P2P meth for the eyes
weird shit that happen kinda happen to me a lot. i felt always that maybe my brain was malfunctioning.
i still kinda do, because it just happen at random when i am outside. sometimes, usually in bright morning light, sunny morning. no i dont look at the sun, yes mostly its visible looking at the blue of the sky.
last time i had it while in 1 on 1 with my manager. it took a lot of struggle not to try and rub my eye or tell her i was seeing this weird rainbow snake floating around.
overloaded cones, hopefully thats not some indication of something bad but just 'tired eyes'.
Is it perhaps a scintillating scotoma? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma
yer a wizard
Wow, mind /eye blowing! Very insightful, thank you!
wow, highly recommended
This was very interesting, thank you for the link.
incredible
If you are interested in "imaginary" colors, the gamut is actually well-specified, and (I hope it is appropriate to comment) that I made a visualization where you can drag a selection thumb over the gamut to see the "simulated" version of that color. Also include it is a 12-step contrast-sensitive color palette generator for said imaginary colors, which would allow you to make websites and (say) vscode themes using entirely imaginary colors! https://docs.moment.dev/d/hausdorff/2zmqjlmldchela29xvbzlbki...
Is it too late to rename it to Octarine?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octarine
In my headcanon octarine is a colour between orange and deep purple. Sometimes it has a hazy blackish halo.
I think it's described as a "greenish purple" in some of the books.
I've always taken it to be that the color is unique to the situation/viewer -- a sort of pearlescent void-color that can't be described in any known language, but which just Is. More a physical phenomenon than an actual color, but distinctly hued somehow.
I always thought it was something like https://www.moodlight.org/ (set to 60 colors/second) or https://flashing-colors.com/ (set to 100 colors/second).
Note that those are possibly photosensitive epilepsy risks if you turn them up to 60/100.
+1 for the Sir Terry reference.
I suspect many animals experience color quite differently, including seeing infrared/ultraviolet, etc.
No suspicion needed, that's a very well studied fact.
I thought of "The Colour Out of Space".
My thoughts as soon as I saw the title :)
The closest approximation to Olo colored paint you can buy is also by the company that makes some of the blackest black paint. I haven't used it personally. https://culturehustle.com/collections/paint/products/yolo-ne...
They also make the orangiest orange paint, the yellowest yellow, the pinkest pink, etc. At a certain point I have to wonder how much these are accurate descriptors of the paint colors vs arbitrary made up marketing nonsense.
Note that there has been controversy for the last few years around Culture Hustle not fulfilling orders and doing other sketchy things. Just a heads up.
I had ordered something from them and it took me initiating a chargeback for them to ship anything at all. The product that arrived was of terrible quality, and their customer support email is completely useless as well, any email gets a canned "your email is very important to us!" style response. My bank denied my second chargeback request because they had technically shipped something.
I've seen those complaints going around but, to add a picoGladwell of data, I've not had any problems with fulfilling orders or anything like that.
There is no "olo-colored" anything; that's the whole point. This is bordering on a scam.
Obligatory “Fuck Anish Kapoor”
https://www.reddit.com/r/FUCKYOUINPARTICULAR/comments/1dxlt6...
Lol $11280.99 now marked down to $33.99!
Really enjoyed this article about it https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/03/what-would-it-...
https://archive.ph/zXZ9d
Aha! I was trying to figure out the colour of the E5/H5 Shinkansen that are used on the Tokyo-Morioka-Aomori (Hayabusa/Yamabiko) line. This is it.
https://kagi.com/images?q=e5+h5+shinkansen&r=au&sh=fWcD0dVpC...
Someone is trying to recreate "the seven colors of the earthly rainbow and the three extra colors you only get in Heaven" (from Scott Alexander's UNSONG).
Reminds me a bit of a Greg Egan story from Instantiation called Seventh Sight. Kids with artificial eyes hack them to see colors and spectrum not perceptible by humans.
Wtf does this mean? “Their square display of olo occupied an angular width of 0.9°[1], around twice the diameter of the moon[7].”
This reads like an SCP article
Ah, thank you. Couldn’t put my finger on it.
I wonder why if this is the reason for the icon color of the game Olo. The left half of the icon background looks so similar.
https://www.eurogamer.net/olo-review
> Olo was discovered on April 18, 2025 by scientists at UC Berkeley.[1][3] The color is named after its theoretical LMS color space coordinates (0, 1, 0), which spells "olo" in leet speak.[4][3]
I presume "loo" and "ool" are in-gamut? What hex values?
703 nm laser is almost “loo”, and 417 nm is almost “ool”. Searching those wavelengths gives me #FF0000 and #6400FF. Loo is all red and ool is all violet.
Since colors are an activation of rods and cones, could we simulate them by stimulating the eye nerves directly? Not necessarily to see new colors, but to replicate the experience of sight? If we managed that, wouldn't it feel exactly the same as seeing something in nature that itches the back of the eye so nicely? I suppose this is entering the brain interface territory.
> The color is named after its theoretical LMS color space coordinates (0, 1, 0), which spells "olo" in leet speak.
:)
Hm, so is it correct to also call it ultragreen? In the same way that ultraviolet is the same effect but for short waves?
In this regard, it can’t be that novel of a discovery.
Ultraviolet is prnamed that because of the Latin meaning of ultra as "beyond", as it's "beyond violet" in the spectrum, same as infrared is "below red".
This would be "sideways green" perhaps :)
This page, which predates the recent olo work, calls it psychedelic aquamarine. https://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/colour/primary.html
Having read this comment from today detailing variance in the default Windows 95 background (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329282), I'm imagining Olo would be your wallpaper if "257 colors" could be supported.
Brown
https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU
So weird. #00FFCC has been my terminal font color for nearly two decades now. Love the color and had no idea about the ‘imaginary’ color Olo.
This is how people talk about how ancient greeks viewed blue, except we actually can't see this color normally.
The stuff about ancient Greeks not seeing blue is absolute internet balderdash.
https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/history-english-colour...
> It’s not that people in the past couldn’t see blue. Indeed, there were several words which could refer to things we would call blue today, but these words could also describe things we’d assign to other colours too, especially grey and green.
"They then used lasers to deliver tiny doses of light"
I didn't know there was funding for this
> Funding: This work was supported by a Hellman Fellowship (R.N.), FHL Vive Center Seed Grant (R.N.), Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant FA9550-20-1-0195 (J.F., C.W., W.S.T., A.R., and R.N.), Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant FA9550-21-1-0230 (J.F., H.K.D., C.W., A.E.B., S.R.H., V.P.P., W.S.T., R.S., A.R., and R.N.), National Institutes of Health grant R01EY023591 (A.E.B., B.P.S., P.T., J.E.V., W.S.T., A.R., and R.N.), National Institutes of Health grant R01EY029710 (V.P.P. and R.S.), National Institutes of Health grant U01EY032055 (V.P.P., R.S., and A.R.), and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface (R.S.).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12007580/
I wonder how long it will take until this is some kind of an amusement park thing or whatever.
We know so much about color, but we're in the dark ages when it comes to odor.
Same thing as “ultragreen” (as in ultraviolet)
how bout Grorange
is zoox olo colored?
Mix with yellow to get new color Yolo
This color does not give a fuck, I use it in my main CTA. People click it like 4000% more
Time for a trip then.
Now I remembered how you see this color. You stare the some shape of 0xFF0030 and then close yores eyes and the inverted color appears.
...
You can't have discovered this same color, solve it requires specialized equipment to see it.
The color in the Wikipedia article is just a rough approximation.
I know that. In pure form that color it is both yellow and blue without being green. You sometimes see it in sunsets.
No, because that's not understanding what this technology, and our cone cells, are doing.
For example, yellow has a wavelength of ~580nm. When that wavelength enters our eyes it activates both the M and the L cone cells, with the L slightly more. That differential activation between the two types of cells gives us the experience of yellow.
Blue actually activates all our cone cells, with S the most and a tiny bit of M and L.
What this technology does is selectively activate only the M cone cells.
There is no possible wavelength that activates only the M cone cells, because the combined activation spectrum of the S and L cone cells overlaps the entirely of the M spectrum. There's nothing natural that can enter our eyes and activate M without also activating L and/or S.
Therefore no one can ever have had the experience of having only their M cone cells activated with anything in the natural world. It can only have been done with this technology.
As for the experience of seeing olo, the qualia, that's almost arbitrary. The authors originally thought it was going to be the "greenest green" but it wasn't really. It wasn't possible to predict what the qualia would be, because the brain has never had that experience. For all they knew they might not have seen anything, because the brain could have just thrown up it's hands at this nonsense signal. Instead they happened to experience this teal-like color. But that wasn't a priori obvious. It's just the brain struggling to apply an experience to nonsense.
It is similar to tiring out the S and L cone cells and then looking away as you say elsewhere -- the authors mention that in the long-form article in The New Yorker -- but this is much clearer and more saturated.
---
Goddammit. Now I remembered how you see this color. You stare the some shape of 0xFF0030 and then close yores eyes and the inverted color appears.
You stare the some shape of 0xFF0030 and then close yores eyes and the inverted color appears.
So, the cover of R.E.M.'s 1988 record titled Green, which is actually orange. You're supposed to stare at it, then close your eyes, and you see the album cover as it's intended to be viewed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_(R.E.M._album)
Can I get note in Wikipedia for inventing this 40 years ago?
lol
lol is the complementary color of olo in the theoretical lms color space.
I guess it’s #FF0033 or so.
No, that's a different color.
> Only the five subjects of the Berkeley experiment have officially seen olo.
Basically equivalent to
source: trust me bro
There's a link to Dynomight's webpage in another comment thread. I've seen olo myself with it. It's to cyan what ultramarine is to sRGB blue.
The word "officially" is the massive wiggle-word here.
Only one person on Earth has officially seen the color of my coffee mug. Send me Venmo for $10, and I'll officiate your viewing of the attached JPG....
I'd heard of weasel words but now that you mention it they do tend to be rather wiggly
Except that this requires extremely specialized equipment to individually trigger specific cone cells in your eyes, so I expect they have a pretty damn good idea of who has seen this and who hasn't.
So, source: trust me bro.