My Favorite Color
What is my favorite color? It’s eigengrau.
If that’s all you were here to see, then thanks for joining us today! It was nice having you. If you want to know why I love this color the most, it’ll be a slightly longer story.
Here’s an experiment: try going into a dark room and closing your eyes. If it’s completely dark, don’t close your eyes at all — you don’t need to, it’s dark enough. What color do you see? Is it black?
Or is it something else?
That’s eigengrau. It’s the color that you see…when you can’t really see anything at all. If our eyes were designed to process light perfectly, you would see black in a black room, but there’s always some form of visual noise that makes us see eigengrau instead.
That’s not to say that we can’t see anything darker than eigengrau, though. If you look at the night sky, the sky looks pitch black because it contrasts with the stars. If there isn’t any reference point, we settle on this color.
And that’s why I, well…also settle on this color. For my website. The homepage of jacobthrall.com is coated head-to-toe in eigengrau, just how I like it. I also use it as the background on my computer monitor. It just looks more visually appealing to me than a black void.
And that’s it! Admittedly, I don’t have much reasoning behind my decision here, but eigengrau is definitely my favorite color. Glad that’s out of the way. And don’t even get me started on favorite food…
image credit: “SMPTE Color Bars” by The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
