color memory test

Almost everyone believes they know what a color looked like five seconds after seeing it. Almost nobody can put it back. This is a free test of that gap: five colors, five seconds each, and a number at the end that is usually lower than people expect.

Five rounds. No sign-up. Takes about a minute.

Start the test

How the test works

Study. One color fills the whole screen for five seconds. Resist naming it — the moment you think “orange”, you have replaced a value with a word.
Rebuild. The color vanishes. You dial it back with three controls: hue, saturation and brightness.
Compare. Your answer meets the real color edge to edge, with no gap and no border, because any seam gives your eye an excuse.

#E05328

#BD7844

A typical result: the guess on the left, the target on the right. Most people call these the same color until they sit side by side.

What the score means

Each round is worth ten points and a run is worth fifty. The score is not a percentage of correctness — it is a falloff curve, so landing close counts for a lot on Easy and almost nothing on Brutal. Above 30 out of 50 on Easy is a genuinely sharp eye. Above 40 is unusual enough to be worth a screenshot.

The number matters less than the breakdown underneath it. Knowing you scored 4.45 tells you nothing you can act on. Knowing you went 53° too warm and 20 points too dark tells you exactly which part of your perception is drifting.

Three difficulties

Easy — five seconds to study, generous scoring. The right place to find out where you stand.
Hard — three seconds, and near misses start to cost real points.
Brutal — a second and a half. Only precision scores at all.

Is this a color blindness test?

No, and the distinction matters. This measures memory, not perception. Scoring badly here says nothing about whether you see color normally — it says your recall is as unreliable as everyone else’s. If you want to know about your color vision specifically, read why this is not a color blindness test and what to take instead.

Keep going

Why color memory fails — what your brain actually stores when it stores a color.
Hue, saturation, brightness — the three dials the test uses, explained.
The twelve hue families — ramps and hex codes for every part of the wheel.