A Guide to High-Visibility Colors and Their Uses

If you’re unfamiliar with why most safety clothing and PPE come in such bright colors, you should know that there are actually numerous reasons. The important thing to remember about all these colors is that their main function is to make sure that the wearer is easily identifiable against a whole variety of backdrops. Even though we know this, why do we still insist that workers wear these very specific colors to identify themselves?

You may be a worker who regularly wears high-visibility safety clothing on the job or only need to don it when you head out to the work site. Either way, it’s good to familiarize yourself with these colors and how they help protect you in dangerous work areas. We’re providing you with a guide to high-visibility colors and their uses. This way, you can easily identify which color is appropriate and why you might want to wear one over the others.

Why Do We Need Specific Colors?

The conditions that call for workers to wear high-visibility safety clothes can vary quite a bit, but there are some general things to keep in mind. Usually, this kind of hi-vis clothing is necessary for working near fast-moving traffic or heavy, human-operated machinery. When we consider these kinds of environments, which tend to have more muted and earth-toned colors, it starts to make sense why hi-vis clothing uses such bright and highly saturated hues as identification.

Hi-vis clothing needs to be able to draw a human’s eye to it and contrast against its backdrop enough to stick out. This is why hi-vis safety clothing usually comes in very bright yellows, oranges, and reds. These bright colors catch our eyes’ attention easily and help signal our brains to pay attention to what we’re looking at. They also contrast heavily with the colors that are common on the vast majority of work sites.

Main Colors Used for High-Visibility Clothing

Now that we understand why they’re so important, we can look at each high-visibility color and its uses individually. While modern work sites might have many kinds of high-visibility clothing, there are still some colors that dominate the looks of the workers there. Fluorescent yellow green, fluorescent orange red, and fluorescent red are all colors you frequently see in a hazardous work zone. This is because they’re colors that have approval from both ANSI and ISEA. We’ll look a little deeper into each color to determine what people usually use it for.

Fluorescent Yellow Green

The most visible color by ANSI standards is fluorescent yellow green. Officially, clothes with this hue must have a total luminance factor of at least 70 percent to receive classification as true fluorescent yellow green. You’ll often see fluorescent yellow green as part of the hi-vis clothing roadway workers wear, and there’s actually a very important reason for this. Roadway work often incorporates a lot of the color orange, such as in orange traffic cones or orange painted stripes on signs. There’s a need to create further contrast between these inanimate objects and workers, especially in areas near fast-moving traffic. That’s why fluorescent yellow green is the go-to choice for hi-vis clothing.

This color also contrasts heavily with urban environments, which tend to have lots of grays, browns, and blacks. This makes workers even easier to see. However, because of the greenish tint to this yellow, you usually won’t see it on workers who work near more natural or green environments like parks.

Fluorescent Orange Red

Perhaps the next most common color of hi-vis safety clothing is fluorescent orange red. In this case, the fluorescent orange-red clothing is actually attempting to evoke the same response as when you see orange traffic cones or road signs. Our brains know that color very well and recognize it as an indication of a hazard or something else to be more aware of. As we mentioned earlier, you won’t often find this color among roadway workers because someone driving very quickly could mistake the color for something more inanimate.

You find this color on construction sites very often, though. Construction sites rarely have bright colors that would allow this hue to blend in. This makes workers safer around heavy machinery that a human might operate. It can be difficult to notice your surroundings when controlling large construction machinery, and this color helps our brains pick out other humans much faster than we might otherwise.

Fluorescent Red

Pure fluorescent red is a newer addition to the standards that ANSI has put forth. But it’s actually quite common in some European countries. Fluorescent red is a good choice for safety clothing when workers operate in low-light conditions, such as around dawn or dusk. Fluorescent red sticks out very well in these dim conditions and draws our eyes much faster than normal. However, you should always pair it with enough reflective material to truly stand out as you should.

Black: Can It Be Hi-Vis?

Surprisingly enough, you can actually incorporate black into some hi-vis clothing. It requires some careful design choices. There must be fluorescent material and retroreflective material present together on the clothes. If you have both of these, you can tweak black gear enough to meet ANSI and ISEA standards. Despite this, black hi-vis clothing is still only appropriate for lower traffic areas. However, it does allow for safety clothing that looks better overall when you can wear it.

Fluorescent vs. Retroreflective Material

Both fluorescent and retroreflective material are crucial to hi-vis safety clothing, no matter what color it might be. Fluorescent material makes us more visible by taking some of the ultraviolet light that humans can’t see normally and making it visible to our eyes through special pigments in the clothing. Fluorescence needs natural sunlight, so it works better on hi-vis clothing worn during the day. Retroreflective material, on the other hand, returns light to the source from where it came. This material makes more light return to our eyes, even in low-light conditions, which increases visibility during nighttime work.

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