Men Worse Than Women At Identifying Shades of Color, Invent Names Like "Breen"

The stereotype of women seeing “ivory,” “eggshell” and “ecru” where men only see white appears to be based on more than just the tired old honey-let’s-paint-the-apartment primetime sitcom gag.

Only a few days after it was determined that women are better at identifying living things and men are more adept at picking out vehicles, an XKCD survey asked 5 million users to identify a color using a certain word or phrase. After that was done, the data was gathered into a lovely chart, with the dot sizes signifying the most often-identified colors (red, green, blue).

The varying-sized dots on the top half of the chart indicate women’s more sophisticated ability to distinguish between specific shades of colors. Some of the designated names: “Light avocado,” “honeydew,” “goldenrod” and “baby poop.”

While the bottom half of the chart—devoted to the male response—is decidedly sparser, that’s not to say the male subjects didn’t get creative with naming the few colors they identified as different than the large dots. There’s “Shit,” “Crap,” “Vomit Brown,” “Baby Vomit,” “Breen,” “Pinkle,” “Awesome blue” and “Barf.” So at least we can all agree on the 50 Shades of Waste that comes out of a baby. Choice.