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The true key to business longevity lies in your products. What you offer has to work as expected — more than that, it has to be safe, functional, and fit any standards you and other governing bodies have set forth. Ensuring that requires testing and more testing, and that's what performance qualification is all about.

What Is Performance Qualification?

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines performance qualification (PQ) as establishing confidence in your finished product or process by testing it before release. This testing should determine whether:

• The product meets functionality and safety requirements.
• Any results can be easily reproduced.

For example, HunterLab's MiniScan EZ 4500 portable spectrometer can identify color using some of the most common color scales and indices. We promise this capability in the product's description. Before we could release that information, we had to complete performance qualification.

To do so, we tested hundreds of color samples to ensure that our spectrometer got the answer right every time. When it didn't, we adjusted our product and tested it again and again until it was as accurate as possible. By the time the product hit the market, we were sure it was ready for wide release.

Research shows that color is one of the most significant variables affecting customers’ choice of virtually all consumer goods, from the foods we eat to the clothes we wear to the medications we take. Colors are vital to guiding consumer choices — selecting the right combination of hues can be crucial to a product’s success.

As such, understanding how color theory works is essential to your ability to fully harness the potential of color. With appealing color harmonies, you can attract customers, enhance their experiences, and shape customer relationships with your product.

What Is Color Harmony?

Color harmony is the concept in color theory that uses geometric relationships to identify harmonious color combinations. These combinations are found on the color wheel, which places primary, secondary, and tertiary colors in rainbow order.

You can find color harmony by placing geometric shapes on the wheel. Choose your key color — the color in your design you cannot change or want to draw attention to — and locate the different color harmony types on the color wheel to identify the combinations most pleasing to the eye.

Once you have found harmonious colors, you can adjust their saturation, tone, tint, and shade. These factors make colors brighter, darker, or lighter, letting you achieve more hues beyond the standard 12 on the color wheel. Changing these aspects of your colors can give your color scheme the right look or mood for your project.

How Understanding Color Harmony Can Help Enhance Consumer Perception and Experience

Color goes beyond visual appeal — it can affect a person's perceptions and behaviors. Color psychology studies how colors affect human behavior, especially for branding. Your color choices will impact your customers' impression of your brand, including whether they purchase from you.

Colors enhance consumer perception and experience through:

• Brand recognition: Your colors speak to your brand's personality, so choose colors that speak to the brand image you want to portray. Use the same colors across all your branded materials to make your brand recognizable.
• Product differentiation: Colors help you stand out from your competitors or differentiate between product types.
• Associations: Every color is associated with a mood or concept. Use these connections to your advantage to anchor your products to a specific feeling.

Examples of Color Harmony

Color harmony allows you to find visually pleasing combinations. The most common color harmonies include:

Direct harmony can be used to make a visual splash, but it’s important to make sure the effect isn’t too intense. For a softer look, choose split complementary colors. Image Source: Flickr user Linda Hartley

Color is one of the most vital indicators of quality and freshness for many products in the food industry, including sugar. Consumers depend on color and appearance before using sugar because these are the few product properties visible to the human eye. While consumers rely on sugar color for acceptability, food processors depend on it to meet processing and quality control standards during refinement.

What Is Color Consistency?

Color consistency involves measuring the differences in chromaticity between two colors. In food processing, this procedure can include comparing a product's color to a chart or another color standard. Chromaticity is critical because it indicates a product's actual color without considering brightness or the effect light has on the product's surface.

Why Color Consistency Is Important in the Sugar Industry

Processing companies make sugar by extracting juice from sugar cane or sugar beet plants. These companies can produce various sugar colors and grades by adjusting the molasses and using variations in drying, cleaning and crystallizing. The amount of molasses in the crystals is the primary determining factor of sugar color, influencing the product's appearance and taste perception.

The more processing sugar undergoes, the more it loses color. Companies must carefully monitor color throughout the refining process to maintain consistent levels of flavor while meeting required industry standards.

Spectrophotometry vs. Spectroscopy

Spectrophotometry and spectroscopy are undoubtedly similar words — however, these terms are not interchangeable. While spectrophotometry and spectroscopy deal with related concepts, they focus on different scientific interactions and outcomes to gain varying insights.

Through this guide, you’ll learn about the difference between spectrophotometry and spectroscopy, their basic definitions and the instruments used in each science.

What Is Spectrophotometry?

Spectrophotometry operates on the principle that every chemical compound absorbs, reflects or transmits light over a specific wavelength spectrum. You can use this technique to determine the amount of light a chemical substance absorbs by measuring the intensity of the light as a beam passes through the sample.

The science of spectrophotometry allows for qualitative and quantitative analysis and is widely used across various industries, including chemistry, physics, biochemistry, biology and clinical studies.

Through forensic spectrophotometry, analysts can intensely study crime scene evidence using the power of electromagnetic imaging. Spectrophotometry is the process of scientifically and objectively measuring color and radio wavelengths. It is more dependable than using human eyes, and it provides reproducible results on an easy-to-understand scale. With spectrophotometry, forensic examiners can distinguish between the chemical composition, material and even brand of a piece of evidence all by examining how the sample reflects wavelengths. 

Spectrophotometry is a preferred method of forensic analysis due to its non-destructive analytical abilities. This process is versatile enough to analyze fibers, hairs and forensic materials such as bodily fluids, drugs and fingerprints. Spectrophotometers also have the advantage of not requiring sample preparation before a material can be analyzed. 

What Is Spectrophotometry?

Spectrophotometry refers to the process of analyzing samples using electromagnetic waves. To test a sample, spectrophotometers test how the light refracts and reflects off a particular material and analyze its color, infrared and ultraviolet properties and more. Using spectrophotometry, you can tell the difference between similar samples of hairs, fibers, drugs, bodily fluids and fingerprints. 

Spectrophotometry works by taking a sample and measuring the intensity of light when a beam passes through it. Since each compound transmits and absorbs light differently, it is possible to identify the true nature of a substance by analyzing this wavelength. Depending on the nature of the sample, it can be studied using either a UV-visible or infrared range spectrophotometer. 

Seasonal color analysis enables fashion-conscious consumers to find clothing that’s most complementary to their features and skin tones through color psychology and color wheel analysis. Seasonal color analysis depends on color theory, which is used as a practical guide for analyzing how color works in the fashion, design and art fields.

Humans have intensely studied color since Sir Isaac Newton first learned how light refracted in the 18th century, and color theory has since evolved into a critical component of our daily lives. Today, the fashion industry still uses Carole Jackson’s seasonal color theory to create unforgettable looks and color palettes. 

What Is Seasonal Color Analysis?

Seasonal color analysis refers to the process of examining a person’s skin tone, eyes, hair and lips to create a color palette that compliments them best. The practice gained popularity in the 1980s when American color theorist Suzanne Caygill combined color psychology with seasonal palette theory.

Caygill’s model became immensely popular among color professionals and inspired psychologist Carole Jackson to write the book “Color Me Beautiful.” By creating seasonal palettes that matched her clients’ features and skin tones, Jackson inspired fashion-forward individuals to create curated wardrobes. 

In astronomy, a star’s color tells its story. Measuring the color of a star gives astronomers immense insights into its temperature, age and composition even from hundreds of thousands of miles away. By measuring stars’ wavelengths, you can determine their elemental makeup and main components.

What Is Astronomical Spectrophotometry?

Spectrophotometry refers to the process of measuring a sample’s electromagnetic wavelengths to determine information such as color, chemical composition and age. Every element in a star emits a unique wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, which allows spectrophotometry to examine the percentage of hydrogen, helium and trace elements in a star. Astronomical spectrophotometry uses Planck’s curve to examine a star’s peak wavelength and understand components of its makeup, which are impossible to judge from Earth.

Since stars are powered by nuclear fusion at their core, they maintain a steady dynamic equilibrium throughout their life and display their life cycle position using color. Due to this uniform time and color cycle, you can determine a star’s age by its hue. Though all stars appear white due to their peak wavelength on the color spectrum, many are blue, yellow, red and green. The following star colors correspond with the listed heat levels in Kelvins: 

• Blue stars: 10,000-50,000 K
• Yellow stars: 5,500 K
• Bright red stars: 3,500 K
• Dark red stars: 2,500 K