Is it Wine? Is it Purple? Can Anyone Really Tell The Difference?
A customer recently contacted us about a Wine coloured Ficcare Maximas hair clip she received from last year’s Silky collection, concerned that she had maybe received a Purple by mistake.
As we had never carried the Purple, we became interested in her question. Turns out, there had been some debate about the differences between Purple and Wine on the old interweb, so we thought Stone Bridge ought to pitch in with our evidence.
Ficcare sent us along a Purple, we dragged our photographer away from his more important duties and we had a play.
First, I must tell you that how digital cameras interpret colour is an interesting science in and of itself. If our photographer had a blog, he could go on about this FOR DAYS. (Trust me on this … yawn) And just for the record, our photographer has been a professional commercial photographer for nearly 20 years. So he knows what he’s doing.
The other important consideration for colour in photography is that your eye (or more accurately, your brain) is influenced by the other colours appearing in the picture. Something can be made to appear more or less intense, or even different from its true colour depending on the hue of its surroundings.
Ficcare Silky Purple V. Wine
So what you see in these pictures is not exactly what you see in “real life” if you had the two clips in your hands.
The colour on these clips has been created, to our eye, by increasing the amount of pigment present in the paint used.
When the two clips are side by side, there is only a slight degree of difference, with the Wine being only fractionally darker, while the Purple appears like an almost milky colour. This creamy quality is not something that seems to come across in our picture experiments.
There is in fact no difference in hue between the two. So the Wine isn’t more red or more blue; it is precisely the same colour, simply more concentrated.
What this means for the picture you see here is that the concentration of the pigment causes more light to be absorbed by the Wine colour, while the Purple in comparison is more reflective. So in a photograph, there appears to be a greater degree of difference in colour than there actually is.
Here are pictures of the clips taken seperately (but labelled, so we didn’t get confused during the shoot!) You can see that the colour and lighting has been kept constant between the two clips by the consistency in colour of the sticky note in the corner.
The two colours are so similar to the naked eye, we’ve had to write the colours on every storage bag to make sure they don’t get mixed up by accident.
So there you go.
Stone Bridge will never have the Purple available on our website, but we do have a couple large clips here, obviously.
Stone Bridge Hair Accessories 