22-04-2025
Opinion In a black-and-white world, colour me olo
In 1856, an 18-year-old was trying to find the cure for malaria. Instead, he found a way to create the colour purple. William Henry Perkin, a student at London's Royal College of Chemistry, dipped a piece of cloth into his mixture of coal aniline and chromic acid. The cure for malaria was still about a century away, but what Perkin did discover was a way to create the first colour in synthetic form. Researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington this week made a similar discovery. They had laser pulses fired into their eyes and claimed to have found 'olo', an 'incredibly saturated' blue-green, a colour 'never seen before by the human eye'.
The discovery was made using a device called the Oz Vision System, named after Emerald City in L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The colour cannot be seen by the naked eye without laser stimulation. The scientists used the Oz to stimulate only the M (medium) cone cells in the eye, allowing them to view the colour. It was named 'olo' to denote the binary 010, indicating that of the three cone cells in the eye — L (long), M and S (short) — only one, the M, is stimulated.
Scientists have argued that the discovery will be helpful in better understanding colour blindness and how the human brain visualises colour. But it has also been contested because of its limited value. After all, what is a new colour when only a few people can see it? If not material or scientific value, olo certainly seems to add philosophical value to the understanding of the world. In a world given to viewing the Other in strict binaries of black and white, olo, with its blue-green timbre and contested existence, shows that there is always room for ambiguity. It also comes with a simple lesson: There is value in looking at things through someone else's eyes. You may just discover something new.
