Not RGB sliders โ real paint logic. Pick two or three pastels from a 72-color palette and mix them, drop by drop, to recreate the target color. Yellow plus blue makes green here, because the mixing is subtractive like actual pigment.
How it works
Each round shows one target color. Tap the palette to add drops of paint and watch your dish change in real time โ but the match percentage stays hidden until you submit, so you have to trust your eyes. Five rounds, and your average match decides your grade.
Why it behaves like paint
Light on a screen gets brighter as you add colors; pigment gets darker, because each paint absorbs light. This test approximates how pigments absorb and scatter, so yellow + blue = green and red + blue = violet, exactly like smudging real pastels together. Painters and designers have a real edge.
More perception tests
Check your color discrimination with the color vision test or spot the different color โ all free, right in the browser.
How to play
- Press START for round one. At the top are two dishes, Target and Your mix; below them the 72-colour palette is laid out as a grid.
- Tap a palette colour to add one drop. Your dish updates instantly, the drop count shows on it, and the limit is 10 drops.
- Every colour you have added appears as a chip under the dishes (colour ร drops). Tap a chip to remove one drop of that colour; Clear empties the dish.
- When the dishes look alike, tap Submit this color. Only then does the match percentage appear, next to the two colours side by side. Moving on empties the dish and shows a new target.
- After five rounds you get a report: average match, grade and the five target/result pairs. Share it or enter a nickname for the leaderboard.
What is in the palette
The 72 colours are 12 hues ร 5 steps = 60 plus 12 neutrals and earth tones. The hues run red, orange, amber, yellow, yellow-green, green, teal, sky, blue, indigo, violet and magenta, and each comes in five steps from a very pale pastel to a dark tone. The remaining twelve are white, cream, three greys, a near-black, and six earths: brown, beige, ochre, olive, brick and navy. There are no fully saturated primaries โ hence "pastel".
Where the target comes from
Every target is itself a mix of palette colours. Rounds 1 and 2 blend two colours, rounds 3 to 5 blend three, each at 1 to 3 drops. So any target can be matched exactly within the 10-drop limit and 100% is always possible; the difficulty rises with the number of ingredients.
How the match is scored
The distance between your colour and the target is measured in OKLab, a colour space built to track how different two colours look to a person, then mapped to 0โ100%. Zero distance is 100%; anything at or beyond what reads as a completely different colour is 0%. Lightness, hue and saturation all count, so a mix that is only slightly too dark or too muddy can lose close to ten points. Each round is captioned 92%+ "Nearly perfect", 80%+ "Great eye", 60%+ "Pretty close", and the final grade uses the five-round average.
| 95% and up | Absolute Color Sense |
|---|---|
| 88โ94% | Master Mixer |
| 75โ87% | Sharp Eye |
| 55โ74% | Painter in Training |
| Under 55% | Making Friends with the Palette |
Frequently asked questions
Does adding two drops of the same colour make it stronger?
No. The result depends only on the ratio of drops. Red 1 + blue 1 is the same colour as red 2 + blue 2. Extra drops matter when you want a finer ratio โ red 3 + blue 1 leans further red than red 1 + blue 1.
How do I make it lighter?
Add white or cream to lighten, the dark grey to darken โ the same direction as real paint. Whitening also lowers saturation, though, so if the target is light and vivid you will usually get closer by starting from the pale step of that hue than by whitening a mid-tone.
Every screen shows colours differently โ is it fair?
Target and mix sit side by side on the same screen, and the score is computed from the colour values, not from the display. A screen that runs warm or cool shifts both dishes the same way, so the comparison holds. Night mode and colour filters do flatten small differences, so switch them off.
Can I see the match before submitting?
No โ that is the point. Watching a number climb turns it into number-chasing rather than colour-seeing. Look from one dish to the other and put the difference into words โ lighter, redder, muddier โ and the next drop chooses itself.
What does the leaderboard rank?
Your five-round average match. Enter a nickname of up to 12 characters on the result screen and your rank appears immediately; your personal best is stored on the device and shown on the title screen. Open a friend's shared link and the title screen shows their score to beat.
Related tools
- Personal Color Analysis โ after making colours, find the ones that suit you
- Color Picker & Converter โ read off HEX and RGB values and build palettes