In 2004 Li-Chen Ou, Ronnier Luo and colleagues found that three feelings, warm or cool, heavy or light, and active or passive, can be predicted from a colour's CIELAB values alone. This page runs their three formulas over all 6,304 sample sheets in the Samplize catalogue.
Scores use each maker's on-screen colour, not a measured paint. Positive means warm, heavy or active.
Each strip is the whole catalogue: every sheet placed by its score and stacked by lightness. The small marks underneath are the 12 most-ordered sheets.
Cool to warm
WC = −0.5 + 0.02 · (C*)^1.07 · cos(h − 50°)
−1.50Rocky Mountain Sky, Benjamin Moore
+1.53Orange Juice, Benjamin Moore
Rises with colour strength, most at red-orange (hue 50°) and least at blue-cyan (230°). With almost no colour, every sheet sits near −0.5.
Light to heavy
HL = −2.1 + 0.05 · (100 − L*)
−1.98All White, Farrow & Ball
+2.22Black Forest Green, Benjamin Moore
Lightness alone, rescaled. It carries the same information as the quiz's depth bands.
Passive to active
AP = −1.1 + 0.03 · √(C*² + (L* − 50)²)
−1.07Iron Mountain, BEHR
+1.66Bright Yellow, Benjamin Moore
Distance from a mid-lightness grey. Strong colour makes a sheet more active, and so does being very light or very dark.
Plotted on mid grey, the background Ou's observers saw each patch against. Bigger dots are ordered more often. Hover or tap a dot for its scores, or search for a colour.
6,304 sheets
The 12 most-ordered sheets score between −0.48 and −0.33, a small part of the catalogue's range of −1.50 to +1.53. Only 1,448 sheets score above zero at all. For warm and cool whites the quiz needs undertone (CIELAB b*), which we already calculate.
Chantilly Lace scores +0.32 and Pale Oak −0.05: the whitest white reads more active than a greige. The most passive sheets are mid-lightness greys. A “calm” answer defined as passive would return greys, not whites.
Heavy-light rises in a straight line with lightness, so it ranks sheets exactly as the quiz's depth bands already do. Agreeable Gray (−1.18) and Pale Oak (−1.31) are neighbours on both. It names depth and adds no new information.
Correlation across all 6,304 sheets, from 0 for unrelated to ±1 for moving in step. Treat them as three readings of chroma, hue and lightness rather than three independent feelings.
| Scales | Correlation |
|---|---|
| Warm-cool and active-passive | 0.54 |
| Heavy-light and active-passive | −0.48 |
| Warm-cool and heavy-light | −0.00 |
A first draft of where each of Glenn and Jo's feeling words sits on the scales. Ou's paper defines only the three scales; the rule for each word is ours.
1,096 sheets
active-passive < −0.2 and heavy-light < 0
Ou's scales only
2,298 sheets
warm-cool > −0.2
Ou's scales only
1,288 sheets
heavy-light > 0.5
Ou's scales only
342 sheets
active-passive > 0.3 and heavy-light < −1
Ou's scales only
2,015 sheets
C* < 15 and heavy-light < −0.5
Adds chroma, which Ou doesn't score