I stumbled on a video that stopped my scrolling and set my curiosity on fire. A media personality, with a mischievous grin, asked a man to name the color of the outfit she was wearing. He guessed. He missed. She tried again. He missed again. The comment section exploded. I didn’t laugh. I winced. Because that was me.
I sent it to my wife immediately, not to mock, but to hide. How many times have I stood in front of her and our little daughter, confidently declaring something was “blue” only to be corrected with “that’s navy” or “that’s teal, daddy.” How many times have I given up and started pointing instead, using shape and location like a detective because the right word abandoned me. I thought I was the only one fumbling in the dark. A quick defense, a nervous share, and maybe she’d excuse me.
But it turns out I wasn’t alone, and it also turns out it’s not just a funny coincidence. The difference is real, and it has been studied for decades. Watch any crowd and you’ll hear it. A woman will say “mauve, maroon, sage” and a man will say “purple, red, green” and feel perfectly satisfied. The question is why.
Anthropologists point to something old and buried in our bones. The Hunter-Gatherer Theory suggests evolution carved two different jobs into us. Women, as gatherers, needed to spot the slightest shift in a berry’s ripeness, the difference between edible green and poisonous green. Men, as hunters, needed to track motion across a savanna, not debate whether the deer was olive or khaki. Research backs this up. Women on average discriminate colors in the red-green spectrum slightly better, and about 12% of women may carry a rare fourth cone receptor called tetrachromacy, compared to less than 1% of men. More cones means more shades. More shades means more words to catch them.
Then language steps in. Linguist Guy Deutscher argued that color words are not discovered, they are negotiated by a culture, and women tend to adopt new ones faster. Think about how we talk to children. A girl hears “your lavender dress, peach sandals, blush lipstick.” A boy hears “blue car, red ball.” By age five the lexicon gap is already growing. The American Psychological Association has also consistently found that women score slightly higher on verbal fluency, and naming a color is, at its core, a verbal act. Men, meanwhile, tend to dominate spatial tasks. We are not worse at seeing. We are worse at naming what we see.
Culture then pours gasoline on that small spark. Walk into a women’s store and you will drown in “dusty rose, salmon, taupe, eggshell.” Walk into a men’s store and you get “black, navy, grey.” The fashion and beauty industry trains women’s brains daily to make finer distinctions because the market demands it. At the same time, social permission matters. In many societies, a man who says “fuchsia” risks being teased. So we self-censor. We retreat to the 11 basic color terms that linguists Berlin and Kay identified as universal: red, blue, green, yellow, black, white, grey, brown, orange, pink, purple. We chunk the world broadly. Women tend to chunk it narrowly, reaching for subordinate terms like “cerulean, turquoise, cobalt” instead of just “blue.”
There is also the question of attention and purpose. Marketing and design studies show that men are often socialized to ask “does it work” before “what shade is it.” Women are more often invited to linger on color matching, coordination, mood. And because industries that demand precise color language such as fashion, cosmetics, interior design, art..remain female-dominated, men simply get less practice and less need.
So no, it’s not that men are colorblind in the medical sense. Biology may give women a small edge in discrimination. Culture gives them a massive edge in vocabulary. And social norms reward them for using it. A man who works as a painter, designer, or tailor will often out-name the average woman, because color, like any language, is learned.
What looked like embarrassment in that viral video is really a story about evolution, language, and culture colliding in one outfit. And the next time my daughter corrects me, I won’t point. I’ll ask her to teach me the word. Maybe I’ll finally learn the difference between mauve and lilac before she graduates.
Bagudu Mohammed
