In a debate that has me questioning everything I know about the colour wheel — and also about Gatorade — the internet is truly divided over whether the lemon-lime Gatorade is green or yellow.
We can thank the TikTok account of the University of Tennessee Volunteers football team for this truly baffling brain-teaser. In the vid, the team members each gave their hot takes on what colour the lemon-lime beveragino was.
As you might expect, things were pretty divided.
@vol_football What do ya’ll think? 🟡 or 🟢🤔 #gbo ♬ FEEL THE GROOVE – Queens Road, Fabian Graetz
“It’s yellow bro. How is that green?” one said.
“Look at the grass!”
A fair comparison: in contrast to the grass, the Gatorade does have a distinctly yellow tone.
But that take certainly wasn’t unanimous.
“Honestly man, I’m not here to sugarcoat things,” said a different player.
“If you think this is yellow, you need to re-evaluate your eyesight.”
I’ll be honest: at first I was entirely team yellow. I scoffed at the suggestion the lemon-lime Gatorade could be anything other than yellow.
Plus, as people in the TikTok comment section pointed out, the flavour is lemon-lime, not lime-lemon. Hence the drink would be yellow because the dominant flavour is lemon. It’s basic science.
But my conviction in the yellow-y truth was shaken by one of the football player’s comparison of a green grape to the lemon-lime Gatorade.
I simply cannot wrap my brain around this: have grapes secretly been yellow this whole time?
Compared to the grape, the drink does in fact look green. This revelation has absolutely shook, shaken and stirred me to my core.
As you might expect, the TikTok comments were seriously divided. Many users pointed out that colloquially, the beverage is known as “yellow Gatorade”. One big tick in the Team Yellow box right there.
But others were understandably stuck on the grape hypothesis.
Others threw out alternate colour suggestions, like “acid green” and “chartreuse”, which sounds like a French swearword but it actually a yellow/green combo.
In a response that I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around for many hours, one person commented: “It’s not green, green. But it is more green than yellow”.
I genuinely believe I’ll be pondering that ’till the day I die.
On Twitter, the general take seems to be that the Gatorade is yellow — but the votes were far from unanimous.
https://twitter.com/brainslime_/status/1563562105969643521?s=20&t=xkRW_dNKOUarlT11VRb5Og
That shit is green idc
— juan (@porgsmuggler) September 2, 2022
Gatorade — the only truly reliable source on this matter — has yet to comment on the drink’s true colour. In my heart it is yellow. But I must respect the bold, brave members of Team Green too.
Now to go sip on a delicious lemon-lime treat and fall into a deep existential spiral.
