Showing you a color you’ve never seen before

Source: Showing you a color you’ve never seen before., A Brush with Bekah, 14:54, uploaded 2025-11-12, Watch Later position 70.

A Brush with Bekah opens at 1:23 in the morning with a promise that sounds impossible: the video will show a colour that does not exist, or one that exists but that only five people have seen. The colour is called olo. The turquoise patch usually used to represent it is ordinary teal, so the image gives away the problem. Olo belongs to a visual experience that the eye cannot reach through ordinary viewing.

Colour outside the visible range

The video places olo among “impossible colours”, alongside examples such as self-luminous red and hyperbolic orange. These are visual phenomena that researchers classify as colours even though they do not correspond to the usual way a colour appears in the world. Bekah first loosens the everyday idea of colour by describing what the eye and brain do with light. Objects reflect, absorb, and emit light waves. Photoreceptors in the eye receive those waves and the brain constructs a colour experience from them. Colour therefore belongs to perception and experience rather than sitting as a fixed property inside an object.

That experience also remains private. Two people can point to the same yellow, use the same word, and receive the same wavelengths whilst experiencing something different. We assume that our colour experiences line up because similar eyes should respond to similar light and similar brains should interpret it in roughly similar ways. The video leaves the stronger question open because nobody can look through another person’s eyes and compare the experience directly.

Olo is a more specific case within impossible colours. Bekah calls it an imaginary colour and places it outside the range that ordinary vision can produce. She compares the limit to a cheap paint set. Red, yellow, and blue may mix into many colours, yet the pigments cannot produce a neon purple simply through more effort. The limitation sits in the materials available for the mixture.

The cones that ordinary vision mixes together

Human colour vision uses three kinds of cone cells. S cones respond to short wavelengths associated with blue light, M cones respond to medium wavelengths associated with green, and L cones respond to long wavelengths associated with red. Bekah presents the three groups as being spread through the same part of the eye, so ordinary light activates all of them to some degree. Every colour we see therefore contains a little cross-contamination from the other cones.

The paint comparison returns here. Imagine trying to mix the most saturated green possible whilst every green mixture must contain a small amount of red. The unwanted red keeps the mixture inside the range that the available materials allow. Olo requires a condition in which the M cones respond without the surrounding contribution from the L and S cones.

The Oz Vision Experiment approached that condition with a much more precise setup than ordinary viewing allows. The researchers mapped the arrangement of the cone cells in particular eyes, then used a specialised group of lasers to stimulate only the M cones. The video says that only five people in the world have seen the resulting colour directly. Bekah treats that direct experience as the discovery of olo, whilst the coloured images circulating online remain representations of a colour that other people cannot see in the same way.

An after-image as a partial route to olo

The video cannot reproduce the experiment. It has neither the mapped retina nor the lasers, and Bekah is not in the viewer’s room to control the conditions. It uses an after-image instead. The familiar version appears when someone stares at an inverted American flag for about thirty seconds, then looks at a white wall and sees the flag’s ordinary colours.

The same effect can push colour vision towards an impossible colour. Staring at one colour for long enough overstimulates some of the cones. The photochemicals that let the cones register colour deplete faster than they regenerate, so those cones become temporarily less responsive when the light returns to normal. The remaining cone group then has a larger relative effect, and the brain reads that imbalance as a negative or complementary colour. The after-image does not create the laser experiment’s precise stimulation, yet it can make one part of the cone system stand out after the others have fatigued.

Bekah warns that the result will be a less saturated approximation of olo. She asks viewers to watch in a dim or dark room, with eye drops nearby if their eyes tend to dry out, then stare at the centre of an image for sixty seconds. The viewer should keep their focus and avoid blinking, especially during the last thirty seconds, before the image changes. If the trick works, the next colour may appear for only a few milliseconds as an unusually bright teal.

The reveal is deliberately modest. Bekah describes the result as a “crazy magical kind of psychedelic extremely bright teal”, then says that a viewer may have seen a tiny percentage of what the researchers call olo. It is the closest approximation available to ordinary viewers in this setting. The after-image gives access to a fleeting difference in cone response, not the direct experience produced by selectively stimulating a mapped retina.

Why the experiment matters

Bekah gives the discovery a medical reason to matter. Some conditions that limit sight involve the degeneration of cone cells, and she describes colour blindness as often involving one defective kind of cone. A better understanding of how to manipulate individual cones could help researchers expand the range of colours available to people whose vision has become limited. The same work may improve life for people who develop cone degeneration with age. The video presents these as possible applications of the experiment, without naming a treatment or claiming that one exists.

The ecological question follows from the same limit in human vision. Birds, mantis shrimp, insects, and other animals have more kinds of cones or a wider range of colour sensitivity than humans do. Expanding human vision could help researchers understand how those species see their surroundings. Bekah ends with the simplest reason as well: seeing a colour that ordinary vision cannot produce is interesting, and she would like to see the world more like a mantis shrimp.

Limits of the demonstration

The video reports the Oz Vision Experiment and its medical and ecological possibilities without linking the underlying paper or naming the researchers in its description. The claims about five people, cone stimulation, and future applications therefore remain claims made within the video. The description supplies chapters, sponsor and Patreon links, and credits Kevin MacLeod’s music, yet it gives no research reference that would let this note verify the experiment independently.

The screen exercise also has a clear limit. It produces an after-image by fatiguing cone responses, so its brief bright teal is an approximation of olo. It cannot show a viewer the same colour that the video says only five people saw under laser stimulation. The viewer’s report is subjective as well, since the video can suggest a change in colour experience without giving anyone access to another person’s private perception.