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The 101 Shades Of Grey: How Many Different Shades Are You?

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How many shades of grey are there really?

In the book Fifty Shades of Grey, the number is used figuratively to describe the moods of Christian Grey, the protagonist of the novel and film. But in real-life, the human eye can distinguish more than 500 shades of grey.

On a computer screen however, the RGB color model can show 256 different shades of grey, where grey is defined as an equal number of red, green and blue (and yes, according to that definition, white and black would both be considered a shade of grey). But if we want to get more specific, we can refer to the X Window System's definition of grey, which lists 101 different shades.

So how many shades of grey are you? And by you, we mean by your Twitter profile picture. The app below takes the picture from your Twitter avatar and counts each unique pixel and looks for shades of grey according to the X Window System's specifications. If you don't have a Twitter account, you can enter someone else's profile to see their number.

Need some suggestions? We recommend checking out @FiftyShades.

I'm a data journalist at Forbes, where I write and work with data in addition to creating interactives and visualizations. Before Forbes, I worked at PBS NewsHour in a s...