How many lego colors are there ? The point of The Lego Movie was that these minifigures shouldn’t have a set order, but rather each individual should arrange them in any creatively chaotic fashion of his or her choosing. Now, one big Lego fan has just meticulously arranged his pieces in a way that honors the brand’s commitment to letting users express their individuality.

Jeremy Moody had to chase down a lot of disparate elements to cobble together the definitive Lego color chart, which is like the Pantone color chart, but slightly geekier. There are 182 different pieces in all, each with its own unique color. While some of them may look similar, Moody has distinguished between the ‘lime green’ and the ‘pastel green’ to show off the entire range of colors Lego fans can use–key information for collectors. After all, it’s important to know your palette before you set out to make your masterpiece.

How Color works?

Before we can understand the strengths and weaknesses of the LEGO color palette, it’s useful to understand how color works. You may recall that there are three “primary” colors of light: red, green, and blue. Your computer can create any color by mixing those three colors; when mixed in equal parts they create white light. This is why colors on your computer are often described as “RGB”, short for red, green, blue.

LEGO bricks are not made of light; they are made of plastic. Pigments are mixed in the right proportions to ensure that every LEGO brick is the right color. The color you see when looking at a LEGO brick is the color reflected by the plastic brick when a white light is pointed at it.

The reflected light is distributed across the visible spectrum, and the cones in our eyes (or the sensors in your camera) detect the light to determine the color which we seen. While digital cameras and computers describe colors using “RGB” values, we will use an easier to understand system called “HSL” (Hue, Saturation and Luminance) to explore the LEGO color palette.

The difference between a vibrant red, yellow, green or blue is what people think of when they say “color”, but the underlying difference is that these colors have a different “hue”. (Hue is closely related to the frequency of visible light that we see.)

“Saturation” describes how pure a color is. Vibrant colors have a high “saturation. Grayish colors like “Sand Blue” have a low saturation. A pure white, black, or a neutral gray has no saturation at all.

“Luminance” approximates the shade of gray you would see if you removed the saturation. For saturated colors, a high luminance results in a “pastel” or “light” color, medium luminance results in a “bright” color, and a low luminance results in a “dark” color.

It is worth noting that the LEGO “Black” is not a true black, but rather a very dark gray, and LEGO “White” is actually a light orangeish gray.

Organizing the LEGO Palette

By photographing every common LEGO color under controlled conditions, and calibrating the resulting photo using a neutral gray card, I extracted the RGB color for each brick, and converted those colors to HSL. This allows us to see the distribution of LEGO colors on various dimensions.

By graphing each color in the LEGO color palette by saturation vs. luminance, you will see some logical groupings of the various colors. It also helps explain some of the differences between the names LEGO enthusiasts use to describe colors, and the official The LEGO Group names for each color:

Bright – LEGO consistently labels many common colors as “Bright Red” or “Bright Blue” that most LEGO enthusiasts describe simply as Red or Blue. Bright colors have almost 100% saturation and around 50% luminance.Light – There are a number of colors with high luminance (around 90%) such as: Light Flesh (Light Nougat), Bright Light Blue (Light Royal Blue), Bright Light Yellow (Cool Yellow), Yellowish Green, Tan (Brick Yellow), and Light Aqua (Aqua). The naming isn’t very consistent, but “light” is the most common description.

Dark / Earth – We also have a variety of dark colors with around 25% luminance including: Dark Green (Earth Green), and Dark Blue (Earth Blue) which both have high saturation, as well as Dark Brown which has low saturation.

Sand – Colors such as Sand Green, Sand Blue, and Dark Tan (Sand Yellow) are very useful to LEGO builders even though they aren’t very common. Sand colors have around 50% luminance and below 50% saturation.

White, Light Bluish Gray (Light Stone Gray), Dark Bluish Gray (Dark Stone Gray), and Black have very low saturation, and around 100%, 85%, 50% and 0% luminance respectively. If these colors had 0% saturation, they would be true neutral gray colors. They aren’t quite neutral, which is why we call the current colors “bluish gray” instead of just “gray”.

When we graph the colors in the LEGO color palette by hue vs. luminance, you can see that some hue values offer a lot of different colors, and other hue values such as pink, purple, green and red hues offer more limited selection.

We find that there are a lot of colors available in the narrow range of orange hues. The selection is enhanced by the around 60% saturation Flesh, Light Flesh and Dark Flesh tones, even though those colors aren’t very common in basic bricks. LEGO also offers a good selection in the low-saturation range as well, such as Tan, Dark Tan, and Brown.

Blue offers evenly distributed options ranging in luminance from Bright Light Blue (Light Royal Blue) all the way to Dark Blue (Earth Blue). Further, Sand Blue is one of the few low saturation colors in the LEGO color palette

Potential improvements

39 different colors is less than the original Nintendo NES video gaming console (which had 54 different colors), and a lot less than our modern devices that can display a nearly unlimited range of colors.

The natural desire to improve the color palette is to add dozens of new colors to fill in the existing gaps. An easy way to do this in an evenly distributed way would be to pick relevant hue values, and ensure that each hue offers a light, medium, bright, dark, and sand option. Unfortunately, it is safe to assume that the LEGO Group wants to maintain a small number of colors to reduce inventory and costs.

One way to improve the LEGO palette is by making the existing colors more consistent. Related colors would be shifted to have exactly the same hue despite different luminance and saturation values. It would be easier to build realistic models if you had a full range of colors from light to dark, as well as both bright and sand colors for each hue.

Another potential improvement is to use the same saturation/luminance values for colors with the same description. For example, all “bright” colors could have 100% saturation / 50% luminance, “light” colors could have 75% saturation / 90% luminance, and “sand” colors could have 25% saturation / 50% luminance.

One practical approach would be to remove a few colors that are very similar (such as tan vs. light flesh) and add options in other areas. For example, you could pick a small number of primary hues such as Red, Yellow/Tan, Orange/Flesh, Blue, and Green. These colors would have a full range Light, Medium, Bright, Dark, and Sand options. Secondary colors such as Pink, Purple, Lime, and Turquoise would remain, but would only be offered in a Bright and Light option. This would result in 25 primary colors, 8 secondary colors, white, light & dark gray, and black for a total of 37 colors, leaving room for special exceptions like Brown, which is an important color that doesn’t fit into the pattern.

To be clear, even a thoughtful change to the LEGO color palette is probably a bad idea. The LEGO Group learned a hard lesson in 2005 when they angered adult LEGO fans by changing from a yellowish gray to a bluish gray. That said, if they do decide to introduce more colors in the future, maybe they will be thoughtful about more closely matching the hues of other existing colors.

Side Note – Gray vs. Bley

In 2005 the LEGO Group made a number of cost cutting changes as part of their efforts to regain profitability. One of the changes was to retire many colors, and tweak a few of the colors to make the color palette more consistent and to address feedback from customers. One of the discoveries was that the old “Gray” and “Dark Gray” colors were not well liked by parents and kids as they have a subtle yellowish tint that appears dirty. Rather than shift to a completely neutral gray, they chose a slightly Bluish gray and “Bley” was born.

I created a couple images showing the differences between Old Gray and New Bluish Gray, to help explain these changes.

Above is information how many lego colors are there.  Hopefully, through the above content, you have a more detailed understanding of how many lego colors are there .Thank you for reading our post.