The Curious Reason Why Oranges Are Sold in Mesh Bags

If we look at the shelves fruit shop From the supermarkets we will see that a lot of fruits and vegetables are coming in. mesh bags the same color as your skin. This is common, especially in oranges, whose containers have the color that gives them their name. But we can also see it with lemons, limes, tomatoes or onions, which are usually sold in yellow, green, red and brown bags respectively. Of course, if the onion is purple, it changes the color of the bag completely.

We may think that this is just for decorative purposes, but this is far from the truth. In this case, sellers use an optical effect to make us believe that the contents of the mesh bags are at an ideal stage of ripeness.

A slightly greenish orange will look much riper and brighter in an orange bag because our brains rely on the context surrounding objects to interpret their color. It’s the same with everything else. You may feel cheated now, but the truth is marketing There are plenty of games like this. That’s why it’s important to know how our brain works.

Deceived by mesh bags

Psychologist Karl R. Gegenfurtner, from the University of Giessen (Germany), went one day, as usual, to buy orange juice at a trusted fruit shop. She told him that due to extreme temperatures last season she had no fruit. mature enough. Carl thanked him for his sincerity and headed to the nearest supermarket to do some other shopping when, as he passed a fruit shop, he saw a stack of mesh bags containing clearly ripe oranges. Hadn’t the weather had something to do with it?

Whatever it was, he was fine with it. If I bought them, I could enjoy ripe oranges. But the joy was short-lived. When he got home and took the citrus fruits out of the bag, he discovered that the oranges were green. As the fruit seller had told him, they had not reached the optimum degree of ripeness. However, when he saw them in the supermarket, he thought they had bright orange color.

At that moment, he realized he had been fooled by the confetti illusion. The discovery left him without ripe fruit for breakfast, but it gave him the basis for a study recently published in the journal. I-perception.

Confetti Illusion and Color Assimilation

Our brain is very prone to fill in the blanks. If we read a sentence that is missing some letters, we may not even notice it. Our brain is responsible for filling in information based on what we have read in other cases. What we have seen, experienced, or felt can fill in the missing information and give us information about the environment around us. And this is what creates the confetti illusion.

The phenomenon of color assimilation is a phenomenon in which our brain interprets colors depending on the context they are in. For example, if we take a picture of a colored ball and put it on top lines of different colors, those in the foreground will change the color in which we see the ball. This optical effectknown as confetti illusion

In his study, Gegenfurtner took several oranges of different shades and tested how their color changed in mesh bags. He also analyzed the confetti illusion throughout history. Finally, it is concluded that the real reason why this type of packaging has flourished over time is that They trick our brains.

The sellers may not be aware of this optical effect. But they, being human, saw that the fruits and vegetables looked different in the mesh bags. They looked more ripe. This encouraged them to continue using them. After all, we, the consumers, continue to “fall into the trap.” And we will continue to do so, because what’s inside may indeed look wonderful. We may not know until we get home and open the bag.

Life is full of random emotions, even when you walk out of the fruit store.