Something I’ve noticed is that, surprisingly, there is a shroud of mystery around the color of Gatorade’s Lemon Lime flavored sports drink. I first realized this when I was playing golf with a friend and he asked a food vendor for a green Gatorade. “Surely,” I thought, “They don’t have the latest Lime Cucumber Gatorade. That stuff is nasty. And they can’t have the Frost: Whitewater Splash flavor; that was discontinued in ’97.” But lo, and behold, the vendor reached into her cart side cooler and pulled out the original Lemon Lime. Expecting my friend to reject the drink because it wasn’t what he ordered, I was further shocked when my friend thanked the cart girl, paid, and went on his way. How could anybody see that drink and identify it as anything but yellow Gatorade? I did some research and apparently its pretty popular to call Lemon Lime Gatorade green. The prominent encyclopedia website “Wikibin” lists it as green under their insanely credible master List of Gatorade flavors. But still sports forums and food websites alike are littered with comments on how they see the drink. Since this was really important to me, and people on the internet need to be corrected, I decided to do some research. Here’s what I found.
My plan was to take pictures of Lemon Lime Gatorade, pick out specific colors in Photoshop, and then analyze the hex values (apparently colors have numbers in them). The first picture I found was of a bottle of Gatorade in the ’90s, maybe early ’00s. People used to sweat this stuff on TV and it was so cool that it wasn’t gross to think about drinking it.
This should be nostalgic for all you little league athletes.
I felt pretty confident after I picked this picture out. Its a perfect item for testing. Its a stock photo, all points of the liquid-colored parts are very similar in shade, and it is obviously yellow. Photoshop even says so.
How neat is that?
Now just look at that little bar with the two arrows next to it. The long one standing up. Those arrows are pointing clearly at the yellow part of the spectrum. And if I wanted, I could even pick out some points that are closer to orange than yellow. Definitely not a green Gatorade. But I kept testing in the name of science.
My next subject was an image I found on the web of the most recent “G Series”. The one with the commercials and the protein drinks and the gummies. This is what the girl would have pulled out of her golf cart to give to my friend in the story earlier. My analysis was much more disturbing to me. The Photoshop color reader was not sufficient enough to make a distinction between green and yellow, so I decided to ask old Uncle Wolframalpha.com for some help.
Best. Website. Ever.
Breathe it all in. So much knowledge. But what’s important is that I inserted the hex values of the most neutral color of the Gatorade bottle and this is what the sentient and all knowing search engine told me. First you can see what the color looks like at the top. And then at the bottom you get Wolfram’s two closest shades to what I had just inserted. Those colors are what I want to focus on. The first one is “olive drab”. Think about that one for a while. Never would I ever drink a sports drink that is colored “olive drab”, but its pretty close to the actual color. The sad part is, nobody has ever eaten a yellow olive. Olives are green. So thats kind of a point for the green team, but I won’t dwell on it.
The other color is “yellow green”. Now when I showed this to my fellow yellow advocate, she was equally as confused as I was. Does it mean that its a greenish yellow? Or a yellowish green? Wikipedia had the answer: “Before the X11 colors were formulated in 1987, the color term yellow-green was used to refer to the color that is now designated as the web color chartreuse (chartreuse green), shown above. Now, the term “yellow-green” is used to refer to this medium desaturated shade of chartreuse.” So many questions. What is X11? Why did we formulate colors in 1987? Why haven’t we reformulated since then? Who decides these names? None of those are important, and maybe I’ll answer them later. The point is is that “yellow green” means its more of a green, but only barely. Now before you green lovers start applauding in victory, the very top of that wikipedia article shows two distinct colors for the name “chartreuse”. One is green, and one is yellow, and the yellow looks much more like Gatorade than the green. Thats just how I see it, but if you look up the wikipedia article you’d agree. Either way, yellow green is described as a variant of green, so I’ll say the score is tied at 1-1. Barely.
Now then. The tiebreaker. I went to my cafeteria and found a little 8 oz bottle of the same G Series Lemon Lime Gatorade. Its pretty well lit, and I took it with my iPhone. I’ll just show you the results.
“When the facts change, I change my mind.” -John Maynard Keynes
This is me picking out the most yellow part of the bottle and getting the hex values and stuff. Its pretty clear to see that its more green. If you want quantitative values, look at the numbers next to R, G, and B. If the G value is greater than R, its more of a green color. Its close. Its so stinking close. We’re talking 49.7 yellow/50.3 green. But this is a green bottle of Gatorade.
To conclude, the Lemon Lime Gatorade that you can buy in stores is technically green, but it looks yellow. In fact, it used to be yellow. It was with the new G Series that it became more green. But still. I’m going to keep on calling it yellow, because thats how I remember it to be from my old baseball days. And if you call it green, don’t make fun of me. I’m just trying to hold on to my childhood.
But who cares. I don’t. I don’t even like Lemon Lime flavor that much.
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