INSIGHT
The Importance of Colour in the Lubricants Industry
Daniel Saraiva, Product Development Engineer, Galp Lubricants Development
“Colour works its effect on us to the extent that even our highest-level cognition and intelligence are biased by low-level impressions”1
Colour is one of the most striking properties of light. It can be defined in a simplistic way as the result of human visual perception to different light wavelengths that vary from about 400 nm to 700 nm. It is such a simple thing but it influences our daily life choices, even in the lubricants industry.
Colour-coding is part of our culture and history. From an early age, we are taught pink is for girls and blue is for boys; we learn red means stop, green means go, even in contexts distinct from traffic lights1
. We make many colour associations,
depending on context and geography, and there is a subjectivity to it as our perception and culture varies widely. For instance, in Japan, hundreds of years ago the language only included four basic colours; black, white, red and blue, thus many green things were defined in the context of the blue word. Even today, it is quite common to see blue traffic lights or green items dubiously labelled blue2
. Color-coding
simplifies our choices, e.g., we evaluate fruit ripeness according to its colour even though it doesn’t always condition flavour quality; a red apple may be just as good as a green one.
These different facets of colour are also quite present in today’s lubricants industry in fascinating ways.
14 LUBE MAGAZINE NO.146 AUGUST 2018
When I started working in the lubricants industry one of the funniest, yet seemingly real stories I heard the most was about colour. When a customer is asked what kind of grease they are looking for, we often hear “the red one” or “I prefer the blue one”. In fact, while working in the product development team of Galp Lubricants, I’ve seen a customer’s request to develop a golden grease. As a chemical engineer with an artistic background, this caught my attention right away. How do we get to the point where the colour of the grease is the first priority of some customers? From my point of view, the explanation is simple and certainly no mystery; colour is an excellent inexpensive branding/ marketing tool that differentiates your top-tier product from other products in the market, creating a perception of quality that is hard to dissociate and raising a barrier for your competitors, regardless of the fact that it doesn’t relate to suitability.
While colour doesn’t indicate quality, it can influence a grease’s performance. Dyes are used in very small portions to obtain the desired colour and in this case any changes on performance are not to be expected. However, in other cases some whiteners like titanium dioxide powders, if used in percentages above 5% will affect properties such as worked penetration, oil separation or even increase wear scar diameter.3
Daniel Saraiva
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