The problem with colour is that it isn’t objective

For an industry built on precision, print and packaging has an uncomfortable secret.

The colour you approve may not be the colour I see.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Inside colour-critical industries, enormous effort goes into eliminating variation. Spectrophotometers measure tolerances to microscopic degrees. Presses are calibrated. Lighting conditions are controlled. Pantones are standardised. Delta E values determine whether a print run passes or fails. Entire production systems are built on the assumption that colour is fixed, repeatable, and universally understood.

And technically, it can. Human perception, however, cannot.

Under controlled lighting, with near-identical grey samples laid edge-to-edge across the bench, the disagreement seemed impossible. Everyone in the room was looking at the same colour. Yet they were not seeing the same thing – only subtle shifts in tone, brightness and neutrality that refused to settle into agreement.

At James Cropper, that realisation emerged not through scientific research or consultancy intervention, but through day-to-day colour-matching conversations within the business itself. Quiet disagreements. Slight hesitations. Repeated moments where experienced professionals looking at the same sample did not agree on what they were seeing.

Initially, nobody thought much of it.

“You just think, well, you’re not quite there with that yet,” recalls Alison Rodwell from the colour team. “Or maybe it takes time.”

That assumption made sense. Colour matching is learned through repetition and exposure. It is one of those disciplines where expertise develops slowly over the years rather than through textbooks. Judgement becomes instinctive. Experienced operators trust their eye because they have spent decades refining it, often under identical lighting conditions, with only the smallest tonal differences separating agreement from doubt.

Mark Starrs had done exactly that.

Like many technical specialists in print and paper manufacturing, he came from a traditionally male production environment. He had worked alongside colleagues with forty years of experience. Colour accuracy was simply part of the job.

And before any of that, there were the tests.

“There are a couple of ways of measuring colour or your sensitivity to colour,” he explains. One called the Ishihara test. That determines whether you’re colour-deficient. Then there’s the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue test, which measures how well your vision distinguishes hues.”

Within colour-critical roles, those tests matter. They establish whether someone can reliably distinguish tonal shifts and subtle variations. The assumption is reassuring: if the tests are passed, colour is being interpreted correctly.

Except reality proved more complicated.

The breakthrough came gradually. As more customers began visiting James Cropper to collaborate on colour development, conversations about shade became more nuanced. Increasingly, the participants in creative colour-matching sessions were women. Not exclusively, but predominantly. And over time, Mark began noticing subtle differences in interpretation.

Nothing dramatic.

Mostly greys.

Light greys, dark greys, and the smallest steps between them that felt insignificant in isolation but became harder to reconcile when placed side by side.

“I was seeing a couple of these colours slightly different in our interpretation of them,” he says. “But that was absolutely fine because we were talking in the same language. Brighter. Darker. Duller. Redder.”

The language mattered because language allowed adjustment. Even if two people perceived a colour differently, they could still navigate towards alignment through shared terminology.

But then Alison took maternity leave.

Internally, secondments were opened up across the business, bringing new people into colour-matching environments. That was when the pattern became impossible to ignore.

“We started getting this thing of, ‘I can’t see what you’re saying, Mark,’” he recalls. “Particularly when we got into dark greys and light greys.”

At first, he assumed it was experience.

“You’ve only been doing this six months,” he remembers thinking.

But then something happened that challenged the hierarchy of expertise entirely.

Samples were sent to customers independently.

The selections customers consistently preferred were not the ones Mark had chosen.

“Females were picking them,” he says plainly. “And the samples getting picked were the ones Lauren or Anna had picked. Not the ones I’m picking.”

For many businesses, the story might have stopped there. A curiosity. An anecdote. A passing observation.

At James Cropper, they decided to investigate.

Internally, the team began retesting everyone using the Farnsworth-Munsell Hue Test to ensure there were no formal colour deficiencies. Then they conducted blind comparisons using highly similar grey samples against target shades.

The outcome was startlingly clear.

“Out of the four ladies and four lads, the men all picked one side, and the ladies all picked the other side.”

No hesitation.

No uncertainty.

Just two distinct interpretations emerging consistently from the same visual information.

And suddenly, an industry assumption began to unravel.

Because if highly trained professionals, all operating within acceptable colour vision standards, could still consistently disagree on colour interpretation, then what exactly does “correct colour” mean?

That question matters far beyond paper making.

It spans print approvals, luxury packaging, cosmetics, automotive finishes, retail branding, and every environment where colour decisions ultimately rely on the human eye.

Particularly because modern manufacturing increasingly seeks to digitise colour fully.

Electronic tolerances now dominate production conversations. Delta E measurements determine whether a print run technically passes specification. Brands rely on data-driven consistency across global supply chains. Remote approvals accelerate workflows.

But as Alison points out, human decision-making rarely operates so neatly.

“A lot of the women who come in to take the samples away, they’re not necessarily the only person making that decision,” she says. “There could be discussions where they’re talking to a male senior who’s saying, ‘No, I think that one,’ and they’re saying, ‘I think that one.’”

In other words, the disagreement may already exist across the industry.

It just hasn’t been openly acknowledged.

Mark believes many technical environments may never have uncovered it simply because the same kinds of people historically occupied the same kinds of roles.

“Any printers I’ve ever been to, it’s always been males who are running the printers generally,” Alison adds. “Maybe there’s not that crossover of people having a discussion about it.”

That observation lands awkwardly because it exposes something bigger than colour.

It exposes how often industries mistake consensus for objectivity.

For decades, many technical systems have been validated internally by groups of similarly trained people sharing similar professional experiences. That does not make those systems wrong. But it may explain why certain perceptual differences remained invisible for so long.

And colour, perhaps more than anything, exposes the fragility of assumed certainty.

Even now, Mark remains cautious about overclaiming the scientific basis for what they discovered. There are evolutionary theories suggesting women may perceive subtle red-green shifts differently. Some studies explore whether certain individuals possess additional cone sensitivity in the eye. But none of that fully explains the experience they encountered.

“There’s certainly something,” he says. “There is a difference. There’s no doubt.”

The practical implications are fascinating.

How many rejected print runs have actually been disagreements in perception rather than manufacturing failure?

How many brand colours subtly evolve over the years because approval teams perceive shade differently?

How often do creative teams and production teams believe they are arguing about accuracy when they are actually arguing about perception?

In packaging and print, these questions are rarely discussed because colour is usually framed as a technical rather than a human discipline.

But perhaps that is the mistake.

Because colour does not exist inside instruments, it exists inside people.

Machines can measure wavelength. They cannot determine experience.

That is why, despite the rise of automation and AI-driven production systems, colour still refuses to become entirely digital.

“I think it’s a combination of electronic and visual,” says Mark. “It always has been for me, because colour is how you perceive it.”

That sentence may ultimately be the most important insight of all.

Not because it rejects technology. But because it recognises its limits.

The future of colour management will undoubtedly become more sophisticated, more measurable and more data-driven. Yet the final judgement may still depend on something gloriously imperfect: a human being standing under a light source, looking carefully, and saying yes or no.

At James Cropper, that realisation has not weakened confidence in colour expertise.

If anything, it has deepened it.

Because true expertise is not insisting your eye is infallible.

It is remaining curious enough to question what you thought certainty looked like in the first place.