Scientists Just Discovered a New Color

• A new experiment into color vision has allowed a select group of human subjects to see a new color.
• Subjects describe the “unprecedented” color as a very saturated teal.
• Researchers are looking into what these findings mean for color blind people.

A team of scientists believes they have discovered a new color outside the range of human vision. They named the color “olo” and describe it as an “unprecedented,” ultra-saturated, bluish-green.

The research, published in the journal Science Advances, describes “human subject experiments” using a laser prototype device named “Oz.” Scientists used the laser to target individual photoreceptor cells in the participants’ eyes—something that cannot be done naturally. Specifically, the laser stimulated retinal M cone cells, a type of cell in our eyes that allows us to see the color green (whereas S cone cells allow us to see the color blue and L cone cells allow us to see the color red), according to the study.

“Theoretically, Oz enables display of colors that lie beyond the well-known, bounded color gamut of natural human vision,” the researchers wrote. “In normal color vision, any light that stimulates an M cone cell must also stimulate its neighboring L and/or S cones…however, Oz stimulation can by definition target light to only M cones and not L or S, which in principle would send a color signal to the brain that never occurs in natural vision.” Basically, by using this specialized laser, scientists were able to lean on a new mechanism in the eye for seeing color, allowing participants to see “olo,” a color unable to be seen by the naked eye without this type of intervention.

It’s tough to get your mind around, but Ren Ng, study co-author and electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, described it as “more saturated than any color that you can see in the real world.”

“Let’s say you go around your whole life and you see only pink, baby pink, a pastel pink,” he told BBC Radio 4. “And then one day you go to the office and someone’s wearing a shirt, and it’s the most intense baby pink you’ve ever seen, and they say it’s a new color and we call it red.”

According to the researchers, this discovery could enable further research into color blindness. They say that Oz could be “programmed to probe the plasticity of human color vision” and may be able to restore full color vision in a red-green colorblind person. Color blindness affects about 300 million people worldwide, so research like this could offer a major breakthrough.

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