Which really blows some people's minds. "Well it's a little bit orange." No it's not, not your regular American bottled or fresh OJ. Straight-up yellow.
(Not denying there are varieties that produce more orange-color juice, like tangerines. But that's not what's on 99% of Americans' breakfast tables.)
Most of them are showing an orange liquid that matches the color of the orange rind. It's hilarious. Because somehow, most people don't realize orange juice is yellow, even though they might drink it every morning.
A perverse feedback loop has clearly emerged. It seems that in the US at least, "To further enhance color, manufacturers add up to 10 percent vividly colored mandarin orange juice as well as pigment from orange peels." [1] Further, it seems that juice colour is actually designed and kept consistent. [2]
> If there's a language in the world where the color and the fruit aren't the same word, I've yet to learn it.
The fruit has the color orange when it's ripe. It's probably one of the most orange things you'll see on nature.
But most people don't even eat it ripe (throwing it away before that point), and the association between the fruit and the color just flies over a lot of people's heads. And yeah, the internals of most of them are yellow.
If the fruit were very unripe, when it has a green rind... I would still call it an orange, not a "green".
It was the name of the fruit before it was the color of the fruit, if I'm not mistaken. Though, I suppose I'm only speculating there. It may have been awhile since I've eaten one, and I prefer the purple Moros anyway, but they've always seemed to be rather orange to me. Quite distinct from the flesh of a lemon, for instance.
> Which really blows some people's minds. "Well it's a little bit orange." No it's not, not your regular American bottled or fresh OJ. Straight-up yellow.
Well, it wouldn't be that weird if you were right because we name fruit juices after the fruit, not the juice color, but I’ve never seen orange juice that wasn't distinctly on the orange side of yellow, even if its more yellow than orange, including fresh and bottled American orange juices.
It's 48°, even closer to orange than orange juice. Yet nobody goes around insisting that bananas are "on the orange side of yellow".
It's a case of linguistics somehow trumping what we literally see with our own eyes. It's actually quite astonishing how strong the effect is, even when it's pointed out to you.
> And if you look at the HSL values of the juice in product photos like the following, you'll get hue values of around 52°:
So, Just clicking around your first OJ example and checking lots and lots of pixels, in all the areas of the juice, the juice pixels seem to be mostly around 38-42, with a low of about 32 and a high of about 50.
So, as I said, closer to orange (30) than yellow (60), though also definitely in between.
> For comparison, here's the first result for "banana" in Google Images:
> It's 48°, even closer to orange than orange juice.
Most of the brightly illuminated top seems to be in the 48-52 range, the indirectly-lit side is mostly in the mid 40s, though there are some pixels right along the bottom edge that are also brightly lit (from the reflection from the white surface of the light source above) that hit around 60.
I don't know what to tell you. I just checked again using Photoshop on my Mac, and the values you're reporting are just not the values.
The cap of the Tropicana bottle has hue values of 25-30°. Which makes sense, because it's clearly visually orange.
So the idea that any of the juice shows 32° is just false. That would be straight-up orange, basically the same color as the cap. But the juice isn't orange. The cap is. In fact, I can't find anywhere on the juice that is anywhere in the 30's, contrary to what you say.
The juice is not closer to orange than yellow. Full stop. It's yellow. Yellow like a banana. That's visually obvious, and it's clear upon exact measurement as well.
(The only thing I can guess is maybe you have some kind of night shift affecting color measurements on your display or something, that's making them redder than they really are?)
That's very interesting. We tend to use a lot of logic as a layer on top of our senses to tell us what we are looking at. One of the most interesting cases (which I can't find a reference for, so sorry) of this that I've come across was an accident in Amsterdam where the person whose car was involved in an accident swore that the other car in the accident had gone against traffic. But from the situation after the accident and eye witnesses it made no sense to believe this. But much later some security cam footage was submitted as evidence that showed the car that had gone against traffic somehow flipping into the position that showed them coming from the right and coming to a rest just like the final scene after the accident was. So, in spite of all defiance of logic the occupants of the first car had it right and the 'eye witnesses' and the accident investigators all had it wrong (and the occupants of the vehicle that caused the accident were lying and could probably not believe they were getting away with it).
I'm sure that in the larger fraction of all accidents eye witnesses will at least get the basics right and that parties are not going to lie about what actually happened. But it's interesting how two minutes after an accident with five witnesses there are probably 10 conflicting stories about 'how it happened' and it makes me wary of any eye witness testimony, especially in less than ideal conditions (night, rain, distance etc). When I first heard about the above case the explanation was that eye witnesses probably heard the crash, looked up and immediately created a mental reconstruction of what must have happened based on what they saw and then reported this as the fact rather than to simply say that they didn't see anything until the moment of impact.
I really should dig a bit more to see if I can turn up something about this case, it is very interesting given your comment because you have provided another example of what I think is the same thing.
In Hungarian there is an umbrella term that covers both the color "yellow" and "orange". To further specify it, there is "lemon ..." (citromsárga) and "orange ..." (narancssárga). This umbrella term is "sárga" and it gets translated to "yellow", so "narancssárga" is "orange yellow", and "citromsárga" is "lemon yellow".
So if you were to ask me the color of orange juice in Hungarian, I would reply "sárga", which is true, as it could be either "yellow" or "orange". Many people would still say it is "orange yellow" though, because the name of the color has "orange" (narancs) in it.
Orange juice, like milk, is complicated because it's a suspension and has subsurface scattering, which makes its behavior in different lights very different and much more complicated than "take a picture and check the HSV").
Modern american orange juice looks especially funny because (I thikn) of all the added calcium- it's more of a whitish orange which I find really off-putting.
I heard it is because the word "orange" is much newer. There were very few things orange in Europe before they saw the tropical fruit orange. Carrots and other things that are orange today were not orange back then.
Which really blows some people's minds. "Well it's a little bit orange." No it's not, not your regular American bottled or fresh OJ. Straight-up yellow.
(Not denying there are varieties that produce more orange-color juice, like tangerines. But that's not what's on 99% of Americans' breakfast tables.)