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International Orange (wikipedia.org)
136 points by khobragade on April 2, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 55 comments


Also the most used color for SMBs (surface marker buoy) when scuba diving.

Interestingly, the bright yellow color usually means accident, while orange means regular decompression stop. I have seen pink ones but they seem very rare.

So I'm guessing people must think yellow is more visible?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_marker_buoy


I’ve started seeing more black DSMBs recently. They’re meant to be very visible, but every skipper I’ve spoken to disagrees.

When I’m doing project diving, we’ll use a pink DSMB to mark something that we want to go back to, and not surface with it.

Orange for surfacing and yellow for an emergency, as you describe.


I feel like there is a market for black "tactical" DSMBs for those dudes who really like to be special ops. And what better color than full black to mean serious operator! /s


I've seen plenty of yellow sausages that didn't mean emergency, I think that's location specific (I'm not sure where it applies). Most people I know pick the color based on personal preference / color matching the rest of the gear.


I've only done some diving in the Mediterranean (south of France). And the orange/yellow colors is the "recommended" advice I got from the local dive shops and the common understanding in the diving boats I've been on.

It a shame that CMAS, PADI or SSI don't propose a standard.


When you have high levels of confidence that the background will be ocean water and the weather is likely to be decent (or at least, decent enough to be diving), then it may be the case that yellow is more visible.

International Orange is designed to be maximally visible under as many different conditions as possible, so may not be the most visible in every single circumstance.


Fun fact: the color commonly called "brown" is really just dark orange.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU


Thank you. I didn't know I needed this in my life, but I did.


Desaturated dark orange more specifically


Well, it's dark orange plus context.


I wonder if this shade of reddish-orange suffers from the Purkinje effect, where reds appear darker to the human eye in low light settings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_effect


Something close to this international orange / safety orange is used for safety equipment on ships.

Lime yellow has become popular on fire trucks, ambulances, and similar. See https://www.apa.org/topics/safety-design/fire-engine-color-s...


Which is at the end of this article for some additional colour info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_(color)#Lime_green


I've often wished that more vehicles were available in these highly visible colors. I really don't like driving a gray van on a gray road in the rain.


So did I, so I wrapped my car orange:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/ru4EBj1SibVu1sqj6


I wasn't prepared for how good that looked. I'm not a big fan of orange, but for some reason it really works on that car. Great job :)


Alright, I just added Google Photos to the list of links I won’t click anymore.

What purpose does it serve to break the back button?


Because google wants to choose what you see and where you go next. The back button is an escape. So they don't want that to work.


It works fine on chrome and firefox for me


Hijacked for Safari on MacOS for me.


(I’m on iOS.)


I hate this redirect nonsense as well. FYI though, if you tap-and-hold on the back button on Mobile Safari, you'll get a menu of the last 10-ish pages you were on.


On Android Chrome too, but the back usually located at bottom of screen (the system back, Android Chrome doesn't have its own back).


Same here. I finally got back after rapidly tapping the back button enough times.


Looks like it only breaks on safari/ios

Works fine on windows on all browsers, works fine on osx with chrome/firefox, doesn't work with safari though


The back button also breaks for me on macOS Safari.


My spec Miata is painted orange. Was supposed to be mclaren orange (called papaya)

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a21083825/for-a-weekend-ca...

The next one will be closer to vinyl Oracal orange (so damage can be more easily hidden)

The shop that makes these has gone for even higher visibility. Yellow and green highlighter colors.


Not the exact same color, but the GR86 is available in orange already.

https://www.toyota.com/gr86/


Orange was introduced for MY2023, but was not available when I bought it in 2022.


Sweet.


As another poster said, just wrap it in whatever color you want. Costs start around 2500$, but that is far cheaper than a paint job and you can get any color you want, without worry about resale value. Personally, i like a matte finish.. something unheard of on production cars. Wrap is an easy way to the effect without repainting.


> Personally, i like a matte finish.. something unheard of on production cars.

Interesting. I've seen a number of matte black cars on the streets. Are those all after-market modifications?


Matte paint is available on some cars from the factory, most notably, some German luxury cars.


Yeah, matte colors seems to be a trendy thing these days.

Or IIRC I read somewhere, the current trendy matte colors aren't as much matte as lacking the highly reflective metal flakes of the popular "metal colors". So it's still a kind of glossy color.


White is highly visible (except maybe in a snow storm!) and a fairly popular vehicle color.

There was a study in Australia about this: https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/216475/An...


It's also an international "you can interact with this" colour for games (handles, climbable pipes, valves, ...)


Depends a bit on which game.

Eg the Tomb Raider reboot uses white for climbables.


Why is International Orange (engineering) red instead of orange?


How do you define the line between orange and red?


If pure red is at 0° hue, and orange at 30°, then that engineering value at 3° is much closer to red. The other two at 18° and 19° better fit the reddish-orange description, still more orange than red, while safety orange is up at 28°.


I'm going to guess it's path dependence, as usual: that 3° hue is called "orange" because it came from iterating on other hues that were more orange.


If you ask people to select a pure red that isn't tinted towards either orange or purple, then on average they say somewhere around -15°. So 'computer' red at 0° is a little bit orange compared to that.


Interestingly, HN's orange is almost exactly halfway between the aerospace International Orange and Safety Orange.


School bus yellow isn't the most visible color. There were some school buses and some customized buses that use(d) a fluorescent yellow-green color similar to safety vests.

Also, microprismatic reflective tape can retrofit a bus to be more visible under low-light conditions.


The article shows orange space suit. Interesting to me cause an orange suit on mars is probably not a good idea. A while suit on moon is also not. If you want to tell objects apart then maybe you need a per planet colour for a space suit ?


White is fine on the moon; every person who walked on the Moon wore a white suit. The Moon looks light colored to us on Earth, but its albedo is about 0.14, which is roughly the same as worn asphalt or dirt.


The orange space suits aren't worn in space, nor were they worn on the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin wore white, despite the moon being a bright gray. These are for recovery operations on Earth.


The white of lunar and EVA suits is white because of temperature regulation reasons, and is very unlikely to change.


Not to confuse with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_orange, which by coincidence(?) is also the brand color of the french Orange group: https://www.brandcolorcode.com/orange


From now on, my HN top color is International Orange.


Are these orange colors easily recognizable by color blindness?


When it comes to colorblindness, it doesn’t make much sense to ask if a single color is recognizable. Color blindness is a difficulty in distinguishing between different colors - some pairs of colors that are visibly contrasting to normal sight may not be visibly contrasting to colorblind sight, such as red/brown, brown/green, and red/green.

There are three main mechanisms of colorblindness, corresponding to the three main types of light receptors in the eye: deutan (green-weak), protan (red-weak), and tritan (“blue-weak”, although this is not a common term). About three quarters of color vision issues are deutan, one quarter is protan, less than 1% is tritan.

When you go out into the world and start interacting with contrasting color pairs, both green-weak and red-weak color vision cashes out as “red-green colorblindness”, while blue-weak cashes out as “blue-green colorblindness”. None of these have issues distinguishing yellow/orange from blue.

Presumably this is actually the motivation for the international air safety color being orange, as it’s easily distinguishable from blue sky.


To add an anecdote to your great general explanation: I'm red-green colour blind, and I can see the International Orange against most backgrounds.

Keep in mind that I can judge saturation and brightness just fine, and that's a big part of what makes that shade of orange stand out.


A further anecdote, I am also (slightly, not absolutely) red-green colour blind. Although I can distinguish between bright reds and greens, darker shades or in lower lights, I am unable to discern between reds and greens.

I'm not always aware that there is a colour I have not correctly perceived, and may simply think that a colour is 'brown', where others clearly perceive it as red or green. However, it's very rare that this causes me problems. I suppose electrical work in low light might be risky, but then I would be taking extra steps to ensure I did not screw up (increasing lighting, asking someone to double check before I touch anything, etc.).


The ingrained psychological/emotional reaction between international and safety orange is pretty interesting for such a minute difference.




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