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My Colgate mouth wash claims to make my teeth one shade whiter in a week. But what does that actually mean?
Fifty 😀
'One shade less yellow/brown' just doesn't have the same marketing sway.
I'm more interested in shades of grey
Emailing claiming that you used their product for a week and you only noticed an improvement of half a shade.
technically none as neither black or white are colours
Surely white is all colours?
Tricky one that. White is FFFFFF, so I guess you could sort of say that white would be colours other than that, but before it started looking too blue, red or green to really be classed as white.
The only way to be sure would be to scan your teeth and see what colour photoshop said they were.
@willard we had a machine one place I worked for doing that (not teeth but I reckon it would work)
We were using it to see how cloths changed colour in the wash (detergent additive research)
You can get meters for [url= http://www.elcometer.com/en/component/productmanager/productmanager?prod=175 ]measuring 'shade' [/url]- how light or dark a surface is. But the their scale takes white as 0% and black as 100%. There don't appear to be units of shade as such so the increment between one shade and another is whatever you want it to be, or whatever differences you are able to detect.
However - these days if you make a claim of efficacy it does need to be backed up by something. It'd be interesting to see what that is, but it'll often just be an opinion based survey.
They can decide for themselves what a 'shade' or 'two shades' is and what their benchmark is -no teeth are absolute pure white light - so what white are they comparing to.
its not really tricky at all. The number of shades depends a bit on the visual acuity of the observer but if you first keep things simple by thinking only in terms of white-grey-black rather than colour then you can imagine splitting that into steps which you can differentiate from their nearest neighbours.
Now the shade which is whiter than the current shade is quite obvious it is the one which is 'paler' on that scale. You can apply the same logic on any monochrome scale, and even in 2/3 dimensions to include a range of colours. When matching colours for veneers / false teeth dentists will have a card (or set of sample teeth) they match to.