Distinguishing colors is perhaps one of the most fundamental human activities. We use color to organize, understand, and describe objects every day of our lives in both conscious and subconscious ways. The greyed meat warns us of spoilage. The orange pill tells us to take it in the daytime. The red leaves tell us fall has arrived. The green light tells us it’s safe to go. We wear our teams’ color to show our allegiance, we tell visitors that our house is the white one on the left, we dress ourselves in black to demonstrate our mourning.

But while colors are often regarded as facts – red is red, right? – the way we come to name and differentiate between colors is in fact a deeply cultural process. This variability of color identification across languages and cultures presents considerable difficulties in an increasingly globalized economy in which color information must be communicated throughout global supply chains. As such, industries are increasingly turning to numerical color classification systems based on instrumental color analysis to facilitate color communication.