Eigengrau, the colour you see when your eyes are closed.

 What colour do you think you see when you close your eyes?

Just close your eyes and try to identify the colour you are seeing, is it Black or other? We all think that when we close our eyes it gets dark and we can see only black colour.

Humans can imagine most colours in their thoughts with closed eyes but without imagination we close our eyes and see darkness but it is not a black colour.

It's lighter than Black and is called Eigengrau.

Eigengrau is a German term and this word is combination of two different words that are 'Eigen' and 'Grau'. Word 'Eigen' means 'Own' and the word 'Grau' means 'Grey', it's translates to 'Intrinsic grey' or 'Own grey'.

The word Eigengrau first appeared in the 19th century and is often attributed to the philosopher and physicist Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), who spent his whole life searching for the mysteries of sensation and perception.

When we closed our eyes and couldn't see any light source, the colour of the Eigengrau was very dark grey. It's never  completely black due to noise generated by cellular activities in the ratina and optic nerve.

The Hexadecimal (Hex) colour code for Eigengrau is #16161D.

The RGB colour code is RGB(22,22,99), Eigengrau has a Red value of 22, a Green 22 and Blue 29.

The CMYK colour code is also known as process colour used in colour printing, CMYK stands for Cyan 24.1%, Magenta 24.1%, Yellow 0.0%, and Key(Black) 88.6%.

There are many others colour scales like HSL, HSB/HSV, CIE-Lab etc.

I don't want to go into the deep explanation of this and now I want to wrap up my article.

Interestingly, on the Hex colour code is #000000 and Eigengrau is #16161D.

Eigengrau is a cool colour and has an Light Reflectance Value (LRV) of nearly 1, indicates how light or dark a colour will look on a scale of 0(Black) to 100(White).

So, it's a very dark colour.

Seema Choudhary