You’ve probably heard the rumors floating around about a "new color" called olo. Maybe you saw a TikTok of someone claiming their bedroom wall is painted in it, or you’ve seen those suspiciously vibrant teal squares on Instagram. Honestly? Most of that is total nonsense.
Here’s the reality: unless you’ve had a high-powered laser fired directly into your retina inside a basement lab at UC Berkeley, you haven't seen olo. You literally can’t see it. Not on your iPhone, not in a sunset, and definitely not at a Sherwin-Williams.
It’s not just a new shade of paint. It’s a biological hack. Scientists have figured out how to bypass the physical limitations of the human eye to create a visual sensation that doesn't exist in the natural world. It’s being called the "greenest green" ever perceived, and it’s breaking the brains of the few people who have actually witnessed it.
What is Olo and Where Did It Come From?
The story of the olo color sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel. In April 2025, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington published a study in Science Advances that changed everything we thought we knew about color theory. Led by vision scientist Austin Roorda and electrical engineer Ren Ng, the team used a system they nicknamed Oz.
Why Oz? Because in the Wizard of Oz, the characters enter a world of Technicolor that’s more vivid than anything they’ve ever known.
The name "olo" itself is actually a bit of a nerdy joke. It’s a reference to the binary code 010. To understand why, you have to remember how your eyes work. Humans have three types of "cones" or photoreceptors in their eyes:
- S-cones (Short) for blue.
- M-cones (Medium) for green.
- L-cones (Long) for red.
Usually, these cones work in teams. When you look at a blade of grass, both your green and red cones are firing at once. Because they overlap, you never get a "pure" signal. The scientists realized that if they could isolate just the M-cones (the middle one, hence 010) and stimulate them without touching the others, the brain would receive a color signal it has never processed before.
They did exactly that. Using ultra-precise lasers and a retinal tracking system that accounts for the tiny jitters of your eyeball, they fired "microdoses" of light into the eyes of five volunteers.
The Experience: "Like Seeing Red for the First Time"
Ren Ng, who was one of the lucky five to actually see it, describes the experience as a "jaw-dropping" moment. Imagine you lived your entire life only seeing pastel pink. Then, one day, someone shows you a fire engine red. That’s the jump in saturation we're talking about here.
✨ Don't miss: Why How to Reset Ford Transmission Control Module is the First Thing You Should Try When Your Car Shifts Weird
Participants described olo as a hyper-saturated, glowing blue-green or peacock teal. It’s so intense that it makes the most vibrant colors in nature look like dull, dusty grey by comparison.
One of the weirdest parts of the experiment was trying to prove the color existed. The researchers asked the subjects to match the color they saw to a digital screen. They couldn't. Even when the subjects turned the saturation on the screen to the absolute maximum, it still looked "faded" compared to the olo they were seeing in their mind's eye. They eventually had to add white light to the laser signal just to bring it down to a level where a computer monitor could even attempt to mimic it.
Can You Buy Olo Paint?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Sorta, but it’s a tribute, not the real thing.
The artist Stuart Semple—the guy famous for his "Blackest Black" and his long-running feud with Anish Kapoor—jumped on the olo hype train immediately. He released a paint called YOLO (the "Y" is for "You," the artist). He basically pulled an all-nighter mixing pigments and fluorescent optical brighteners to try and capture the vibe of olo.
Semple’s YOLO paint is a stunningly bright, glowing teal, but even he admits it’s not the actual color. Since the real olo is a neurological event caused by lasers, you can’t put it in a bucket of acrylic. It’s like trying to bottle the feeling of a dream. You can describe it, and you can paint a picture of it, but the physical paint will always be limited by the physics of light reflection.
Why This Actually Matters (Beyond Cool Wallpapers)
It’s easy to dismiss this as a "weird science" headline, but the implications for health and technology are actually massive. This isn't just about making pretty colors; it's about understanding the limits of human hardware.
1. Curing Color Blindness
The Oz system acts like a microscope for the retina. Because the researchers can now target individual cells, they might be able to help people with color blindness (specifically deuteranomaly, or red-green deficiency) by stimulating the underperforming cones directly.
2. Treating Eye Disease
By mimicking the symptoms of cone loss, doctors can use this technology to "see" what a patient with macular degeneration sees. This helps in developing better visual prosthetics and therapies.
3. Future Display Tech
While your current OLED TV can't show olo, this discovery is a roadmap for future engineers. It proves that our brains are capable of seeing way more than we currently do. We are essentially living in a world of "standard definition" color, and science just found the "4K" button.
The Controversy: Is It Even a "New" Color?
Not everyone is sold on the "new color" branding. Some vision scientists, like John Barbur from City St George’s, University of London, argue that olo is just a really, really saturated version of green. They claim that just because we’ve found a way to "overdrive" the eye, it doesn't mean we’ve added a new entry to the visible spectrum.
👉 See also: The Macbook Air 13 Midnight: What Most People Get Wrong About This Color
It’s a bit like a "forbidden" color. In nature, the overlap between our red and green cones is there for a reason—it helps us distinguish shades in a world of complex light. When you strip that away, you're looking at a raw data feed that the brain wasn't necessarily designed to handle. Some people who saw it found it almost overwhelming.
How to Get the Olo Look Today
If you’re obsessed with the aesthetic but don't have access to a Berkeley physics lab, you have to look for "crossover colors." These are high-chroma, high-saturation teals that sit on the very edge of what a monitor or a pigment can do.
Look for these specific shades if you want to get as close as possible:
- Farrow & Ball's Arsenic: It’s punchy and has that slightly "unnatural" feel.
- Earthborn’s Lido: This is widely considered the closest match in the world of heritage paints. It’s bright, unapologetic, and has zero subtlety.
- Benjamin Moore’s Teal Blast: For that "glowing" digital feel in a physical space.
Designers are already calling this the "super-teal" trend of 2026. It's moving away from the muted "Sage Green" and "Millennial Pink" eras and toward something much more aggressive and electric. It’s the color of the "post-digital" world—bold, slightly artificial, and deeply hypnotic.
What You Should Do Next
If you want to stay ahead of the olo color curve, stop looking for it in the paint aisle. Instead, keep an eye on developments in augmented reality (AR). Experts believe that the first place we will actually "see" olo-like experiences outside of a lab will be through high-end AR glasses that use retinal projection.
For now, if you're an artist or designer, use this as an excuse to push your palettes. Experiment with fluorescent under-paintings or high-saturation digital filters. We now know for a fact that the human eye is hungry for colors it hasn't seen yet. The ceiling for what we can perceive just got a whole lot higher.