Scientists discovered a “new” colour: Olo

Updated April 23, 2025, 8:17 a.m. | By East Coast Breakfast / Skyye Ndlovu

Scientists claim to have found a “new” colour called olo, but it kinda looks familiar.

Move over blue, green, and that mysterious shade your mom calls “mauve”. Scientists now say there’s a new colour in town, and its name is olo.

Yes, olo. It’s not a typo or a Scandinavian baby name. It’s a whole new colour no human has ever seen… allegedly.

Researchers in the US claim they’ve tickled the very edges of the human visual spectrum by blasting laser beams directly into their eyes.

The goal? To see what happens when you poke just the right cone cells in the retina.

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The result was a mysterious, hyper-saturated blue-green hue dubbed olo (pronounced exactly how you think it is).

“It’s more saturated than anything you’ve ever seen in the real world,” says Professor Ren Ng.

He is the co-author of the study and one of five brave test subjects who willingly stared down a high-tech laser beam in the name of colourful curiosity.

To paint a picture (pun intended), Ng says it’s like spending your whole life seeing only soft baby pinks.

Then one day, someone walks in wearing the boldest, most outrageous “fuchsia” shirt imaginable and calls it red.

How did they do this, though? Well, the experiment involved a device nicknamed “Oz” (not because it magically whisks you away to a new world).

Oz is full of mirrors, lasers, and optical doodahs engineered to isolate and stimulate individual cone cells in your retina.

Now, in case your high school biology is a little fuzzy, your retina is the part of your eye that processes light, using three types of cone cells – S (blue), M (green), and L (red).

Normally, any light that hits your M cones (the green ones) also hits their neighbouring L and S cones.

However, in this experiment, they figured out how to target the M cones and only the M cones, creating a kind of colour signal the brain has never processed before.

It’s sort of like sending a text message in a language no one’s ever spoken.

That brand new neural signal is olo. The colour cooked up in your brain by science, and here it is:

Groundbreaking right? Nope.

Not everyone’s convinced that olo deserves a spot in the Crayon box just yet.

Professor John Barbur, a vision scientist who wasn’t part of the laser-eye squad, says the findings are interesting, sure, but calling it a “new colour” might be a stretch.

“It’s a matter of interpretation,” he explains, noting that tweaking cone sensitivity can change how colours appear, kind of like Instagram filters, but for your eyeballs.

In other words: maybe it’s new, or maybe it’s just a weirdly intense teal.

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Should we care, though?

Well, aside from the existential crisis of realising there might be colours you’ve literally never seen, this research could actually have real-world applications.

Ng and his team believe their work might lead to breakthroughs in understanding (and possibly treating) colour blindness.

So while olo might not be the next wall paint trend, it could still help millions of people see the world differently. Literally.