82 Lustrous Facts About Colors That’ll Blow Your Mind

The colors of fire hydrants give a reasonably accurate picture as to how much water flow and pressure they can provide.

2. In the Middle Ages, those who dyed blue fabric and red fabric were members of different guilds and were forbidden to dye any other colors than those of their own guild. Therefore purple cloth was rare.

3. An Israeli chemistry professor named Fernando Patolsky has invented an “anti-date rape straw” that detects date rape drugs present in a drink and alerts the victim by changing color

4. Horses have the largest eyes of any land mammal, have excellent day and night vision, but they have two-color or dichromatic vision. Their color vision is somewhat similar to red-green color blindness in humans, where certain colors, especially red and related colors, appear as shades of green.

5. Most people dream in color, but those who grew up watching a monochrome television, there is a good chance that they dream also in black and white.

Cheddar cheese is only orange because they dye it. Originally, the color of cheese changed with season due to the cow’s diet. Farmers started dyeing it to eliminate seasonal color fluctuations. This escalated to the current day orange color.

7. Crayola's most senior crayon molder, Emerson Moser, when he was retiring after 37 years and molding approximately 1.4 billion crayons, revealed that he was actually color blind.

8. When UPS set up shop in West Germany in 1976, the company’s brown color scheme upset locals who still had fresh memories of the Nazi Party and its “brown shirts.” To defuse tensions, UPS had its employees wear green uniforms.

9. Pencils have been painted yellow ever since the 1890s. The world's best pencil graphite came from China. In China, the color yellow is associated with royalty, so American pencil manufacturers started painting their pencils yellow to indicate they contained high-quality Chinese graphite.

10. In the 1980s, a team in New York showed that an enzyme from green coffee beans could remove the B antigen from red blood cells, turning any blood type into group O, the universal donor.

Your veins look blue because subcutaneous fat only allows blue light to penetrate skin all the way to veins, so this is the color that is reflected back.

12. In 2009, a fruit grower named Ken Morrish in the UK was left stunned when he found an apple on his tree split exactly half green, half red down the middle. The fruit's striking coloring is thought to be caused by a random genetic mutation at odds of more than a million to one.

13. The atmospheric debris caused by the eruption of Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia in 1883 resulted in blood red sunsets all over the world for months. Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” depicts a Krakatoa sunset over Oslo, Norway.

14. Flamin' Hot Cheetos have caused panic among parents whose kids ate too much of them, resulting in a reddish stool that sent them running to the emergency room. It was just the chemicals that turned the stools red.

15. Hydrangea flowers are a naturally occurring pH indicator and can change color depending on soil acidity. In acid soils, chemical reactions occur in the soil that turns the flowers blue. In alkaline soils, these reactions cannot occur causing the flowers to remain pink.

Ordinary Scotch tape produces a glowing blue light where the end of the tape is being pulled away from the roll. In 1953, Soviet scientists first observed that unpeeling a roll of tape in a vacuum produced X-rays.

17. In 2012, beekeepers in France were confused to discover that their bees were producing blue and green honey. Investigations later found it was the result of bees foraging in the waste from an M&Ms factory.

18. The Shoshinsha mark is a green and yellow symbol that new Japanese drivers must place on their cars for a year; conversely, the Fukushi mark (orange and yellow) is for elderly drivers. Both marks warn other drivers that the marked driver is not very skilled due to inexperience or old age.

19. Viagra, Cialis, or Levitra can cause a person to see everything tinted with blue. This is referred to as Cyanopsia or blue vision.

20. Chronic exposure to Silver or silver dust can cause Argyria. The most dramatic symptom of argyria is that the skin permanently turns blue or bluish-grey.

Smarties are flavored as such: White is orange/cream, yellow is pineapple, pink is cherry, purple is grape, orange is orange and green is strawberry.

22. The sun glows a cool blue as it sets in the Martian sky. The red dust in the atmosphere scatters red light, so when anyone looking around would see a reddish sky. Meanwhile, the red wavelengths are filtered out of the direct path of light from the sun, leaving light towards the bluish end of the color spectrum. Those looking at the sun will see it as blue.

23. “Ripe Black Olives” in a can are actually olives which are neither black nor ripe when they are picked. They are picked very green and then cured using dilute brine and lye solutions.

24. Prescription bottles are orange or light brown due to its ability to prevent ultraviolet light from degrading the potentially photosensitive pill through photochemical reactions, while still letting enough visible light through for the pills to be easily visible.

25. Oranges are actually green when grown in a tropical climate. They only become orange in color when grown in more temperate climates.