Two people looking at the same sunset, their retinas glowing with different patterns of cone cell activation, scientific illustration style with visible wavelength annotations

The short answer? Yes. And no. But mostly yes.

Setting aside philosophical questions about qualia (whether your "red" feels like my "red"), there's something objectively weird about human colour perception that most people never notice:

Cyan and blue are separated by roughly 20 nanometers in wavelength, and most people struggle to name the difference between them.

Amber and orange are separated by about 10 nanometers—half the distance—and everyone immediately recognizes they're distinct colours.

Why would half the wavelength distance produce more perceptual difference? Shouldn't perception scale linearly with physics?

Split visualization showing 20nm between cyan and blue as overlapping fuzzy circles, versus 10nm between amber and orange as crisp distinct circles, wavelength scale visible beneath

Why Do We Have So Many Words for Warm Colours?

Count the colour terms you know between red and green:

Crimson, scarlet, vermillion, burgundy, maroon, cherry, rose, pink, coral, salmon, peach, rust, copper, bronze, orange, tangerine, apricot, amber, gold, yellow, cream, ivory, chartreuse, lime, olive...

Now count between green and blue:

Teal, turquoise, cyan, aqua, cerulean, azure, sky, navy...

You've got 30+ specific terms for the warm range versus maybe 10 for the cool range. And the warm terms are precise—people know vermillion from scarlet, sage from mint. The blue terms are vaguer, more atmospheric, harder to pin down.

This isn't cultural accident. Berlin & Kay's linguistic research shows this pattern holds across languages worldwide. Red-yellow-green terms emerge universally before blue terms. Some languages don't even distinguish blue from green as separate categories.

Data visualization showing density of color terms across the visible spectrum, dense clustering in red-yellow-green range, sparse scattering in blue range, gradient background showing wavelengths

What's Actually Happening in Your Eyes?

Your eyes have three cone types: L (long wavelength), M (medium), and S (short):

Notice something? L and M are separated by just 30 nanometers. M and S are separated by 114 nanometers—almost four times wider.

Scientific graph showing three overlapping bell curves representing L M and S cone spectral sensitivity, tight overlap between L and M cones, wide gap to S cone, wavelength axis 400-700nm, peaks labeled

Your colour perception isn't about absolute wavelengths. It's about the ratio between cone responses. Red-green discrimination happens across that tight 30nm window where L and M cones provide high differential information. The green-blue gap is massive, giving you far fewer distinguishable steps.

But it gets even more skewed. Your retina has roughly 100 times more L and M cones than S cones—S cones make up only about 2% of your total cone population. And in your fovea (central vision where you're reading this), S cone density is significantly lower. Your visual system heavily prioritizes red-green information over blue-yellow, both in spectral spacing and sheer photoreceptor count.

More samples = more information = more distinctions = more words = richer phenomenology.

What Happens When the System Breaks?

Now here's where it gets fascinating. The most common forms of colourblindness—deuteranomaly and protanomaly—are deficiencies in M or L cones respectively. Knock out or shift one of those cone types, and suddenly that entire rich warm vocabulary collapses.

Normal trichromatic vision of fall leaves
Deuteranope vision of fall leaves
Deuteranope Normal Vision
Normal trichromatic vision of woman in red dress
Protanope vision of woman in red dress
Protanope Normal Vision

Drag the slider to compare normal vision with deuteranope (leaves) and protanope (woman in red)

A deuteranope (missing M cones) loses the 30nm discrimination window. Their remaining L and S cones are separated by ~144nm. The warm spectrum—all those ambers and corals and salmons—compresses into mush. They can still see "colour," but that fine-grained red-orange-yellow-green gradient is gone.

This is why colourblind-corrective glasses work by narrowing the L-cone spectral response—they're trying to artificially restore separation in that critical 30nm overlap zone where all the perceptual action happens.

Technical diagram showing how colorblind corrective glasses use notch filters to separate L and M cone responses, before and after spectral transmission curves, enhanced discrimination zone highlighted

So Do We All See the Same Colours?

YES!—assuming normal trichromatic vision.

Slight variations in cone sensitivity (you might peak at 565nm where I peak at 563nm) don't matter much because colour perception is ratiometric. The math is the same. The phenomenology follows from the math.

Neural network diagram showing how different cone peak wavelengths still produce identical opponent-process color signals through ratio computation, mathematical equivalence visualization

When biology deviates—missing cones, shifted peaks, neural processing differences—then yes, colour experience diverges. But for the ~93% of males and ~99.5% of females with normal trichromacy, we're all running the same algorithm on the same hardware.

The warm spectrum feels richer because it is richer—not subjectively, but informationally. Your eyes sampled that range more densely (more cones). Evolution put the resolution where it mattered: finding ripe fruit against green leaves, reading social cues from skin tone changes, detecting subtle environmental gradients. I do wonder tho, why the lack of infrared vision...

Infrared photograph - click to explore in high resolution

Blue? Cyan is... atmospheric. Contextual. The sky, the deep ocean, distant mountains. Important, but not worth the neural real estate I suspect.