Euan Lawson
On being colour blind
Not dark blue…
Sometimes being colour blind catches me out. I’m protanopic so don’t have much in the way of the red cones when it comes to colour vision. One of the effects is that I struggle to see purple. It just doesn’t quite register with me at all.
I was in a conversation about someone at work and I was explaining that a colleague’s Outlook out-of-office indicator was on. It looks dark blue to me but it is just a little ‘off’ and I suspected it might be purple. Yes, said the person to me, it’s purple, bit like the Cadbury colour. I took a beat.
The. Cadbury. Colour. Is. Purple.
It turns out Cadbury products are purple and not dark blue. You almost certainly knew this. I did not. My gast is utterly flabbered. In turns out, that in fact, the whole Cadbury brand look is a kind of deep purple. Dairy Milk. Fruit & Nut. Buttons! All of it. I’ve been eating them for pretty much five decades and all this time I thought it was a dark blue. I just didn’t know. Weird.