This new eye test has people doubting their eyes: are these squares green or blue?

The question is simple: which colours do you see in the squares above: green or blue? It’s not really that easy, though. A new eye test from England makes this seemingly easy thing a lot more difficult than it looks on the surface. Opticians from Optical Express have put together this little quiz. They ask you to list the colours of the five different squares. The shades of number 1 and 3 are easiest to most people: those two are clearly blue.

But the other shades are turning out to be a little more difficult for most people.

Which colours do you see?

A thousand people were asked by the opticians to identify the five colours in the picture. Especially the second and the fourth colour turned out to be difficult for a lot of people. One-third of the asked group said they were sure that the second shade was blue. For the fourth shade, two-fifths of the people said they saw blue as well. Yet these answers are wrong because both 2 and 4 are green.

New eye test

According to the opticians who devised the test it’s pretty close. In the fourth square, the prominent colour is green, but it has a bit of Tifanny blue in it as well. Were you, like many others, wrong too? There’s no need to stress because it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with your eyes or that you’re colour blind. The opticians explain that everyone perceives different colours in different ways. “We perceive an object’s colour based on a comparison to its surrounding shades, not on the actual colour itself,” one of the researchers explains. When we see a green square next to a blue square, our brains can more easily identify the green as green.