Yellow Drift · 2026
A word
goes in.
A colour
comes
back
changed.
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The experiment
Search for “yellow” on Google Images and you get images.
Search for “gelb” — the German word — and you also get images.
The question is: are the colours the same?
They are not.
Yellow Drift measured the difference. 36,451 images across 32 languages, averaged into 32 distinct colours. The same concept. Different language. Different yellow.
They are not.
Yellow Drift measured the difference. 36,451 images across 32 languages, averaged into 32 distinct colours. The same concept. Different language. Different yellow.
The measurement
Each colour was extracted by averaging the pixel values of the top image
results for the local word for yellow. ΔE measures the perceptual distance
between two colours — the higher the number, the more different they look
to the human eye.
Reference: #FFFF00 · RGB 255 255 0
32
languages.
32
yellows.
One
unstable
colour.
A colour does not exist independently of language. What the internet returns as “yellow” depends on which language you speak — and which culture has fed the search engine. Yellow Drift makes this drift visible.
Read the findings →Explore further