Selects: How Color Works

Hi everybody, This is Chuck here. Happy Saturday.

I hope you're doing well. Do you want to know how color works? There's a lot to it and you can learn it all right now. This one is from May twenty first, twenty fifteen.

I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry and it's stuff you should know.

Color and technical color.

Yeah, which is really something.

It's tea technical.

Yeah.

Yeah, imagine what it was like back then. Oh man, I'll debut.

Just melted people's eyes all bait probably did. You're like, wow, how are you doing?

I'm great.

I'm glad to hear that.

Yeah, how are you?

I'm good. I'm tired, but I'm good.

Yeah.

I got to precurely to study.

Oh yeah, I had to get up early to make the cheese.

What oh you know it's just saying.

Don't wait, wait, who's saying, yeah.

Make the cheese, make the sausage, make the doughnuts.

I've heard make the doughnuts.

You never heard make the sausage.

I've heard you don't want to see how the sausage is made.

Yeah, just pick anything.

Make the cheese, I don't think so cut the cheese, milk the cow. People get up early for that, so I guess there's that association.

Have you ever milked a cow?

No? Have you? No?

I was talking to Emily about that the other day because we went horse riding and I'd never ridden a horse before.

Oh yeah, it's pretty neat.

Huh, it's my.

New favorite thing. Yeah, it was amazing how awesome it was.

Did you jump over anything on the horse?

No? But we like, you know, trotted up a hill.

Did you shoot a bow and arrow?

No? I almost fell off though.

And yeah when he trotted up the hill, I got like kind of loose in the saddle, as they say.

I was like, whoa, okay, well that's exactly what you should said, as woe.

Well, no, he was going uphill, so I had to just keep on trucking. Really, yeah, I didn't want to stop him. Good for you, man, he was carrying a load. I felt bad for the horse.

I'm sure he was fine.

Yeah, he was all right.

Yeah what was his name?

Oh? Man?

Now I'm kicking myself like a horse because I called this horse by his name the whole day, and now I can't remember Calvin.

I thought we'd bonded. I guess I was just pretending.

That's cool. The horse probably can't remember your name either.

Yeah, and he took a big dump. They do that, right, and then just stopped. And I was like, what are you stopping for?

And I was like, oh, oh, you're lucky even stop sometimes they just walk and do that.

Really, all of the ones on our little ride stopped.

To poop, which I thought was maybe I'm confusing them with another animal humans just walking poop at the same time.

Anyway, it was my favorite new thing. I loved it.

That's cool, man, I felt very at home. What color was the horse?

The spotted ones, which I love, man.

I was hoping you were gonna say, like blue or red or something easy?

Did you smashed the table?

Let's go with blue? Okay, blue?

It was a blue horse.

So allow me to explain why your horse appeared blue. Okay, As Newton figured out, that horse was not inherently blue. There's nothing inherently blue about that horse. Yeah, it's all in our perception.

Yeah, because color technically doesn't exist.

It exists in our minds.

Well, yeah, the perception of color does exactly, But like an apple isn't just there's nothing in the apple that's red.

Exactly, chuck, And there's nothing in your horse that made it blue. Now, what happens is that color is basically our perception of a specific wavelength of visible light.

That's right.

And visible light is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes everything from microwaves to radio waves, to gamma rays.

To ocean waves.

Not quite, but visible light is part of that wavepools. No, no, no, just those things that I said. Okay, So along that spectrum is this very narrow little slice that's visible light. And invisible light which we see is like white light, sunlight. Yeah, it is the presence of the rainbow, which are called the spectral colors.

It's right.

On one end, you have the short wavelength, which is blue. On the other end, you have the long wavelengths, which is.

Red technically violet.

On the other side, well, red has a bunch of different names. When you start reading in the color.

Well, no blue on the blue side, it's like starts at violet. But we don't perceive it very well.

Oh well, I'm talking about what humans can see, right, Yeah, and then everything else is in between.

Right, and what's really in the middle, Like yellow, Maybe it seems like yellow is kind of in the middle.

Yeah. When you think, you tell me.

Well, on the other end, beyond violet, you've got ultraviolet, and beyond red, you've got infrared.

Yeah, these are things we can't see.

No, we can't. Some animals can, remember they think monarch butterflies are able to migrate all the way to Mexico using ultraviolet detecting ultraviolet. I remember that.

Oh yeah, man, that was a good episode, pretty amazing.

So this band of light, this visible spectrum, contains the spectral colors which we perceive, right, And for a very long time, everybody just thought, well, that apple's red or that horse is blue. That's just how it's born. There's nothing that can be done about it.

Yeah.

And then like we said, along came Newton, and Newton said, no, something weird's going on here. Like you said, color doesn't really exist. It's in the eye of the beholder almost literally. Yeah, right, And the reason why an apple seems red or your horse seems blue are because of natural chemicals found in say the skin of the apple or the hide to the horse. That are called pigments. So in an apple, specifically,

That's right.

And that's if it's an object that is opaque.

Well, yeah, that's a big one right there. Yeah, apples are pretty opaque.

Yeah, I would say, so that's your Superman maybe.

Yeah, heats invisible see through apples. Oh yeah he can. Can I get your joke now? So yeah, with an opaque object, where light doesn't pass all the way through, some lights reflected back. So in the case of anthracyanins, this pigment absorbs all the other wavelengths of light except red, and it reflects red back, and so red is reflected back. So what you see when you look at this apple with all the red light reflecting back at you is a red apple, that's right. That's how we perceive color

Yeah, and if it's transparent, it's not reflecting that light but transmitting it. So it depends on the color of light that's passing through it instead of reflecting back to you.

Yes, and again it's that chemical makeup.

It operates in sort of the same way, right, It's just not like in an apple skin, let's say.

Yeah, exactly. But it all comes to do It comes down to basically pigments or whatever natural chemical or mineral that either absorbs or reflects certain wavelengths of light.

That's right.

So here's the thing though, Chuck, Like that can happen all day long, and as long as there's not a human or a monkey, or a dolphin or a dog, because dogs are not colorblind, that's right. They see and colors than we do, but they're not color blind.

I always wonder how they do this tests animals.

Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, I'm sure it's pretty easy to find out, but I just didn't have time to look into it.

I'm with you. Yeah, this is like in massive black hole of information, Like you could just keep going and going and going with colors such a huge expansive topic that we could just do nothing, but color episodes for the next several months. If we wanted to do you want to kill me?

I may not make it through today's.

So you're doing great. This is fine, This is great, Chuck. It is a very like big subject. Yes it is, man, We're just we're providing a brief overview of it.

That's right.

So, like I was saying, things can reflect color all the time, but as long as there's not something there to perceive it, is there any Is there really any color there? Well that's a philosophical question, but there's an answer to it, and the answer is no.

If a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear, it doesn't make a noise.

No. Actually, my opinion on that one is yes, okay. But with color, yeah, it doesn't exist without being perceived. I think. Yeah, sound to me is different than.

It's a bit of a brain melter. But I see what you're saying.

Okay. So that leads you to the question of how do we see color? And that wasn't figured out until the eighteenth century, and it wasn't proven I think, until the sixties. And there were a pair of guys who were a dynamic duo. If I've ever heard of one before, and what were their names?

Well, Thomas Young, he was I thought he was kind of the main guy. I had never heard of.

The other guy, Hermann von Helmholtz.

Yeah, Thomas Young. What I read was that he was the first to propose the trichromatic theory. Basically that we see everything through red, green, and blue channels because that's how our eyes pick up on color.

Yeah, because we have specialized cells in our eyes called cones, right, Yeah, I think we have something like one hundred million or some ridiculous amount of rods. And rods are the things that we see in like fine detail, black and white typically, right. Yeah, Cones are color perceiving cells, and each cell is specialized to you either attuned to wavelengths that red, green, or blue.

Yeah, you have way more rods than cones, about one hundred and twenty million rods in each eye and only only about six million cones in each eye.

And those cones are concentrated mostly in the front of your retina, Yeah, in the middle, right, which is why you don't see color peripherally quite as well.

That's right.

So these cells are attuned to different wavelengths, right. The long wavelengths are red, medium is green, and short is blue.

I thought you said medium was yellow.

No, that's in the middle.

Oh okay, right, so medium is not in the middle.

Well as far as our RGB goes, gotcha, okay. And so with these cells, Chuck, if you're looking at your

Oh, i'ds up to one hundred million, now.

Is it? Because I've seen all over the place in this The nineteen thirty one CIE findings are the ones that people say, this has the best science behind it.

Oh really, yeah? Yeah, so one hundred million, no, I'm sorry, ten million.

Okay, okay. The other thing about the CIE is that people say, well, this was only under certain types of illumination. I think three different types of illumination, so it is entirely possible if you change the intensity or whatever, you're going to have brand new color. So ten millions reasonable, Okay. That's a lot of colors that we can see, all from the red, the green, and the blue cones coming together and your brain adjusting them and seeing, oh, well that's burnt sienna.

I know you're gonna say that, did you. Yeah, that's sort of the go to joke color, right it is.

It's pretty joky color.

It's a good one. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Ten million colors, or let's say it's two million, if you're going by the nineteen thirty one model.

Yeah, you know, the CIE naming convention.

Shall we talk about some of the characteristics of color.

Yeah, but let's take a break first. This is getting heavy, all right, okay.

Saish all right.

So if you actually you can do this on your modern television as well, But it seemed like most TV's now kind of come fairly set up.

Yeah, but in the old days, when you had those.

Little wheels to try and get that color right, it was you know, you might have noticed things that said hue and intensity or value or tone and all that stuff. Those are all color characteristics. Yeah, and Hugh specifically is I mean, that's basically what the color is. It's not the lightness or the darkness. It's you know, it's the greenness or the redness or the blueness, right, that's the hue.

Yeah, it's it's what you can interchange that word with color.

Yeah, exactly. I like how they refer to it as the identity of a color.

Yeah, that sounds kind of personal.

The intensity is how pure it is. So, like we said, most colors are mixes. You know, they bleed one way or the other on the wavelength, but in its purest form a single wavelength, which is really rare, that would be the purity or the intensity.

Of the color.

Right.

You're not gonna see that very.

Often though, No, And I was wondering, like, that's pretty cool. There's some physics labs some where that can produce pure saturated green like unadultterated green or unadultraated blue.

There is, or you're saying, I'm sure it's got to be.

There has to be. Yeah, probably that has got to be really something to see. To know, you're looking at green, like nothing but green. I would like to see that sometime.

Yeah, and I have I'm not color blind, but I have a more difficult time picking out other hues in a color, whereas Emily's really good, like when picking out paint colors, like that gray has this and this and this in it, and I'm like, really like I see gray.

Well, supposedly a lot of people have a color deficiency.

I might have a slight color deficiency.

And a lot of people don't realize it. Well, yeah, a lot of people don't realize that. They think that this just this color just looks like this and thinks everybody sees it that way and that's not the case. And then it comes from a conversation where they're like, well, wait a minute, what do you mean you see a distinction between those?

Well, but yeah, but in my case, it's hues. It's not like I see a completely different color, right, or you.

Know, black, or everything's just looks gray.

Yeah.

I did a brain stuff on color blindness. That's pretty interesting.

Yeah.

I went to research that one time for a show and it would just like bent my mind so much I quietly filed it away.

So I'm sure you'll pick it next week.

Color blindness, Uh huh.

Yeah.

Value is the lightness or darkness of a color, and that's basically has to do with light, the energy of the light that makes it up.

Yeah, and the value is so hues. There's really just kind of a finite, very finite number of colors of hues, right.

Yeah.

And you think of like primary colors, which we'll talk about soon. But when you adjust something, when you adjust the value of it, yeah, that just creates a whole new range of colors. So if you add a little black to a color, what you're doing is shading it.

Yeah.

If you add white, you are creating a tint.

Yeah.

And then if you add black and white a gray, you're toning it.

Yeah, right, And I think people interchange those words without understanding what they mean.

Yeah, but they are definite distinct things, and that we should probably say. There's a lot of really neat sites on the internet. Pantone is a really good one, yeah, where you can go look at color wheels and things like that and see the distinction between these things and be like, oh, you mean pastels. That's another word for a tone.

Yeah, And it's a lot of people really get into it because it's the basis of printing and art and photography, and like every every sort of art form, well not every art form, but many art forms boil down the color. So if you go to art school, you're going to study color pretty deeply, yeah, you know.

Yeah, And one of the things you're going to study is color theory. And color theory is based done the idea that certain colors contrast one another, certain colors complement one another, certain colors should never be used together. And not that it's just you know, your instructor serge saying no, these colors don't go together. It's not just Serge's opinion, right, These are objective facts as far as color theory goes. Sure, And it's all based on the idea that all colors

Yeah, and there's a couple of I mean, there's two distinct applications for both of these. If you're talking about a computer screen or a television that's using light, so it's additive. If you're talking about paint or photography that's subtractive.

Right, So you can think of it this way. With additive colors, you're starting with black and you're adding light to it, and ultimately, when you add all these additive colors together, you're going to have white. With subtractive colors, you start with white, and when you add all these colors together, you're ultimately gonna have black. And they subtract by absorbing one another's colors.

Another color mind bender two because with subtractive color, you're still adding colors, but it's not additive, right, But they're sort of have to wrap your head around that.

Yeah, but they're subtracting wavelengths by combining colors and absorbing.

Them, right, Yeah, it takes a hue out.

So a really good example of subtractive colors is if you take cyan. Cyan absorbs orange, red, right right, So if you take cyan and you mix it with yellow, you produce green. And the reason that cyan and yellow produce green is because the cyan absorbs the red light and the yellow light. The yellow absorbs blue violet, and so the only color that's not subtracted or absorbed is green. So green is produced from these other pigments absorbing all

Yeah, And like the apple is an example, like we said earlier, of a subtractive color system. And again, like a TV screen would be additive.

Yeah, I think we got that. Yeah, I mean it is mine bending a little.

Bit some of the stuff, you know, I have to read like ten times and then it sinks in.

But the reason that all colors can be turned into either additive primaries or subtractive primaries is that these are the six colors of these, they're the six spectral colors. They're the rainbow colors. Right. So additive primaries are what red, green, and blue.

RGB.

Yeah, and then the subtractive colors are cyan, yellow and magenta.

Yeah, I was gonna say magenta.

They're almost like bizarro colors. They're the bizarro world primary colors. When you think of primary colors, you think of like the the what red, yellow, and blue is what most people think of.

Yeah, Red, yellow, and blue were the traditional primaries, and they still are, but when it comes to like painting and printing, they've been replaced with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

Right, cmyk.

Yeah, when you go to your clubhouse printer, Yeah, that's what you're gonna be.

Seeing, cmyk. Or you can select RGB as well, red, green, and blue.

So Crosby Stills Nash and Young, right, right, or Crosby Stills in Nash.

Yeah.

Okay, that's the difference.

That's a good rule of thumb.

Man.

All right, So we mentioned primary colors just a second go, and then we have our secondary colors green, orange, and purple hues, which you get from mixing the primary colors, right, and then you have something called tertiary colors, which is just furthering the color hues by mixing primary colors with secondary colors.

Right, So the six tertiary colors and the two sets of primary colors or the six secondary colors I think, and the two sets of primary colors form the color wheelers twelve colors in the color wheel.

Yeah, and tertiary colors are the ones that you'll hear like blue green or red violet. Yeah, it's like literally named the two colors.

And color naming is another rabbit hole that you can go down. There's a sight. Man, I wish I'd written it down, but it's if you type in like who names colors or color naming or something like that in Google. Like one of the first page entries is the site that you go through and it shows you different colors and you write what you would name that color? Oh, interesting, butter yellow or something like that, right, and the whole

Oh that's pretty interesting, Yeah, just because it's easier to understand.

It's just it's basic, like colors appear to be basic universally.

All right, I think we should take another break and maybe come back and talk a little bit about how colors can compliment each other and live in harmony and what that all means to us.

Okay, s.

All right, we're back.

We sure are.

So we talked about the different primary color, secondary, and tertiary. And there's also something called complementary colors, which are basically contrasting colors that make a neutral color when put together, right, and they are really far apart in hue, as far apart as they can be. And there if you look at the color wheel, they're on the complete opposite side from one another, right, And when you place them next to each other, then their hue is like, I guess.

It's just more robust looking, yes, because they complement.

One another, right, Yeah, complimentary doesn't necessarily mean like, oh, they look great together under all circumstances. So some complementary colors, like red and green, if you play them next to each other in the same intensity and the same size, it's another one. Yeah, you are going to have what's called an iceore. I have a shirt like that. It's just too much equal amounts of bright red and bright green.

Trying to think of that shirt.

It's just a Christmas shirt?

Is it retired?

Yeah?

Well for the holiday.

Yeah, it's a holiday. Sure, Okay, But the whole point of having colors and using colors together isn't just like, well, these two are opposite the color wheels, So I'm going to use them and equal amounts and equal intensity and everything will be great. You have to achieve what's called color harmony, and in doing that, you want to choose different different shades or different tones or different tints, and

Yeah, and again this is when we say it's not a matter of taste. That's like picking something out as a matter of taste. But again, these are like scientific rules. You can't just throw two colors together and say that looks great or that they're harmonious.

I mean, I guess you could, but you'd be wrong.

You would surge would be like you're wrong. This is objective stuff.

And then with complimentary colors.

Getting back to that, there's this really cool thing that they bring up called retinal fatigue. So you can do a little experiment at home that's kind of blows your mind, but it really illustrates how color works pretty well. If you look at a bright red spot for about a minute, your retinas are going to soak in all that red, all those cones are and then when you go immediately and look at a white surface, you're going to see green briefly, right, not forever, right.

And the reason why is because your red cells have just been basically overstimulated and they're going to respond weakly to the information that they're getting from that white right, Yeah, And your blue and green cells are going to be functioning just fine, so they're going to easily overwhelm your red cells. And so what you'll see is this ghost image of like a cyan square.

Yeah, which is why. And the reason why is because red is the complement of green. It'll always be that opposite, right.

It doesn't just like randomly pick out a color.

I know. And if you start adding all this stuff together that there are objectively complementary colors that you see when you see too much of the opposite one, doesn't it all seem to fit so cleanly together that you're almost like what is going on here?

Like?

What is color? Why do we see color?

Yeah?

It's a really good question, and evolutionary biologists have not been able to explain it fully.

Yeah, I guess I really never thought about that because there's well, I mean there's probably some evolutionary benefit, right, sure, Like green things are generally good to eat.

Yeah, but green is also the kind of a universal color for disgust or sickness or illness.

Oh like you're green because you're.

Green around the gills or something like that.

Yeah, that's true.

Green is often like the color of rot grass. But it's true. I mean, it's both. So how do we evolve to understand the nuanced and I mean clearly if we didn't evolve too sea in color so that we could do this we have as a byproduct of it, but we can very easily tick off whether something is healthy for us dangerous. We get a lot of information about an object in our environments quality and desirability based on its color. It's almost like a shorthand that our brains pick up.

Yeah, And part of that is because we're conditioned after years of using green for go and green for safe passage, and like red or orange for hazard signs and stop signs. So part of that's conditioning. But as far as like going back many many years before we made stop signs, I have no idea.

Yeah, you know, it really makes you wonder and even like the idea that pink is for girls in blue is for boys, that's a fairly recent development. Prior to I think the early twentieth century, it was the opposite.

Did we ever do that as a show or didn't know it's too short? I think we did, like a video one or something, didn't we Maybe I seem to remember.

That, But it was the opposite until like the nineteen hundred's interesting, Yeah, yeah, that's interesting totally.

Is that's why you rock your pink shirts?

Well, yeah, right, that's exactly why.

That in fashion.

So getting back to harmonious colors if they are side by I mean this is if you're like picking out colors in your house or whatever, if you're not very good at it, there are a few hard and fast rules colors that are and get your little color wheel out is really handy. If they're side by side, they're going to harmonize well. And like we mentioned, colors directly across from one another, complimentary ones also go well in the right proportions because, like you said, the size of

No, but you could conceivably say, use the complementary color for like the trim or something like that.

Yeah, exactly, And then tints and shades and tones of the same.

Color are always okay together.

It's never gonna clash, but you're just gonna have to mess around with like how much of one compared to the other and what pleases your eye?

Right, Yes, so there is. You can't clash though.

No, And so again Surge is saying, like, no, there's objective truth as to complementary colors and harmonious colors, but there is also personal preference. Oh sure, And this is kind of like the thorn in the side of the whole idea of color psychology that people use colors to manipulate other people into like buy a product or whatever. Study after study keeps finding that color preferencing color symbolism, Yeah, is extremely personal. It's based on past experience, on your upbringing,

Yeah.

Well in the East, white is the color for morning.

Right.

So there's a lot of culturally bound ideas about color too, which keeps it from being like universally symbolic or whatever. But that being said, there are some that just from being exposed to it time and time again, like a red stoplight that you come to identify symbolically with other stuff.

Yeah, And colors will also affect everyone differently mood wise, but there are some generalities there too, Like blue is generally a soothing color that will calm you down. Too much though could actually have the opposite effect, like too much blue.

On some or it can really depress you.

What blue can Yeah? I wonder if that's why they say you're blue?

Yeah? Yeah, I mean think about we describe our world like that green with envy. Blue means you're down in the dumps.

Red means you're angry, yeah, red faced, yeah, or red neck light.

That's different, it's a little different.

Warm colors, reds and yellows can also lift the spirits if you're less excitable. And they say that most people want to just strike a balance though, between the cool and the warm.

Right, and that's when it comes to like personal preference. Yeah, but the idea behind this is that a lot of people don't realize this is going on, that they're being affected by color, even though they are. That it's on a very unconscious level.

Yeah, And it also depends a lot on light, like how much light a room has coming into it, because you're gonna because sunlight is different than artificial light, your shirt's going to look a different color outside in the sun as it might.

And I remember when we did the TV show there was a lot of.

With colors and stuff, you know, things would look different outside than they would under studio lights.

Right.

What's neat though, is we humans have developed this trick called color constancy, where if you look at something, even if it's in the shadow or in the sunlight, it should conceivably look like different colored things because of the illumination. But to us, we're still like, no, that's still green, just because there's you know, shadow blocking it. Now, I

It's very cool.

They also bring up in the in the House off Works article something I think is pretty interesting, how certain, because of conditioning, certain colors can just appear to be wrong.

Like if you were to pull up and see a green stop sign, it would freak you out.

Yeah.

Or the example they used to hear is if you cracked an egg and there was a green egg yolk, that would be really freaky too, because you're just so used to that yellow, right, you know.

You'd think, well, this is diseased or something.

Yeah, or doctor seust right, you know what else you got? Did you look at that thing on pigment?

I did. There's some wacky ways people have made pigments.

Yeah, I mean pigment as far as making paint in things. Now they're synthetic, you know, like their synthesizing laboratories, which makes sense. But throughout all of history, up until they started doing that, they were actual real things in the ground and on the earth that they would grind up into powder. In the case of blue, there was a semi precious stone called er there still is called Lapis lazuli that was found all over the place in Afghanistan, and that's how they made blue.

Or Azureite is a blue mineral of copper.

So all of them, most of them have a few different ways they could make it red. I think we've talked about cinnabar before. The mineral is where you get vermilion red and carmine. Carmine is bright red and that comes from aluminum salt of carminic acid. So it's just crazy that they found all these things in the world to make. And I know blue is the toughest one

Yeah, that's true. Blue horses, No, Well what about mine? My favorite was India yellow, where they would feed cows nothing but mango leaves and then collect their urine and then boil it down, then filter out the concentrated muck and then make balls out of it. And there was the basis of your pigment.

Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff.

So those are just a few if you really get into pigments, and you can like go crazy trying to figure out where they all came from.

Definitely, And I mean again, this is like really just the surface of color. There's so much to it, and I strongly advise you to go out and learn more about it. Color it's everywhere.

Oh, how about the one last factoid? Why is the sky blue?

Oh it's a good one.

Sky's not really blue.

No, it shouldn't really have any color. Yeah, but the angle of the sun coming down on the upper atmosphere encounters things like water, vapor, and other tiny particles, and they tend to scatter blue wavelength light more than the other colors.

Right, that's it.

So that's just bouncing around at all points, which is why the sky is blue. It's say, like noontime. But while the sky's blue at noontime over here, it's say sunrise or sunset to the east or the west.

Yeah.

And since all that blue light is getting scattered over you where it's noontime in the east of the west, those reds and yellows and pinks are making it all the way there, and the blue is not, which is why sunrise and sunset it tends to appear reddish, whereas like midday appears blue.

Yeah, which is It makes total sense. And when your kids ask you why is the sky blue, you can tell them you.

Can tell them like the real reason you can.

Be like color does not actually exist. Yeah, it's all lie. Good luck with that and go to sleep. If you want to know more about color, just type that word in your favorite search engine or how stuff works dot common. It will take you on a wild ride. And since I said wild ride, it's time for listener mail. Uh.

I'm going to call this something I've never heard of before, precocious puberty.

Uh you ever heard of that?

Yes, we talked about it did it early puberty?

Okay, did we talk about that?

Yeah, we said it.

I guess this is in girls, so maybe that's why it got you.

Surprise me.

I'm a long time listener, and thanks for helping me in my commute every day. Really enjoyed and giggled my way through the episode of male puberty. Thanks so much for mentioning precocious puberty.

Well, there you have it.

I was diagnosed at age two after my mom came to wake me before.

School one day before I had a full beard.

Now before preschool. This is a lady and she had started her period at two years old. Wow, And as you can imagine, my mom was terrified. It took a long time to get a correct diagnosis since it is pretty rare. My treatment started out as daily shots that my mom gave me at home that then went to weekly, monthly, and annually as a year's progress.

I also had intermittence days in the hospital for testing.

Ah, that poor kid.

I know.

Treatment was stopped when I reached twelve years old, essentially pressing play and my puberty that had been on pause for almost ten years.

See that's cool treatment.

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that they figured out how to stall puberty.

Yeah, they're like stay stay Okay.

God.

I have only hazy memories of this, of course, as I was a child, but I do remember that missing shots caused quite a bit of pain since my.

Body was growing out of control.

Essentially, I've never been able to find out what the long term effects might be, but I've had a pretty decent health into my adult life and I'm now thirty one years old. Awesome, So thanks a lot.

And that is from Lauren in California.

Well, thanks a lot, Lauren. Appreciate that we love hearing from people with real life experiences of stuff where you just talk about that's right.

You know.

If you want to let us know about your real life experience, we want to hear it. You can tweet to us at s y SK podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always, joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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