Simultaneous contrast
The same grey looks warm on blue and cool on orange. Every color changes its neighbors.
- Named by
- Chevreul, 1839
- Found at
- Gobelins tapestry works, Paris
Simultaneous contrast is the way a color shifts depending on what surrounds it. Put one mid-grey square on a blue ground and another on an orange ground. The first looks faintly orange, the second faintly blue. Each surround pushes the square toward its opposite, and makes it look lighter on dark grounds and darker on light ones.
The idea has a great origin story. In 1824 the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul took charge of dyeing at the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris, where customers complained that the black wool looked weak and reddish. The dye was fine. The blacks sat next to blues and purples, which tinted them. He published the rules in 1839, and the book became a handbook for painters, above all Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists (La Grande Jatte).
Josef Albers turned it into a course. The exercises in his Interaction of Color (1963) ask students to make one color look like two, and two different colors look like one, using nothing but what surrounds them. Once you've done it with paper squares, you stop trusting a swatch seen alone.
This is why ColorHub's screens are neutral grey: a colored frame would tint every swatch. It's why paint chips look different on the wall at home. And it's the flip side of color constancy: the brain judges color by comparing, not by measuring.
Swatches
- The same grey...
- ...looks warmer on blue
- ...and cooler on orange
Colors
Sources
- Chevreul, M. E. (1839). De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs. Paris (English trans. 1854).
- Albers, J. (1963). Interaction of Color. Yale University Press.
- Viénot, F. (2002). Michel-Eugène Chevreul: from laws and principles to the production of colour plates. Color Research & Application 27(1).
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.