Spectral Metamerism

About the named brands. The preset profiles are author-specified canonical values used throughout the corpus to keep worked examples consistent. They are illustrative, not measured — nobody was surveyed to produce them. More generally, the Brand Spectrometer reads publicly available discourse rather than a sampled respondent cohort, so a reading of an elite-luxury brand reports how it is described in the open record and is never the perception of verified luxury consumers.

What this shows. Two different emission profiles, projected through a cohort's salience weights, can yield one perceived reading — metamerism. The perceived reading is a salience-weighted mean, perceived(P) = Σ wᵢ·Pᵢ / Σ wᵢ. Click “Make B metameric to A”, then drag the cohort weights: the two readings split apart. That is the point — metamerism is observer-relative. A different cohort resolves the very brands the first one confused; there is no observer-free “true” reading. This collapse is exactly why a single perceived impression underdetermines the emission — the Brand Spectrometer triangulates across cohorts and artifacts to constrain it.

What it does not claim. This is a deliberately simple one-scalar projection for teaching; a real reflection is cohort-resolved with a noise floor and reported only when signal clears it. For the geometry of the projection, start from the math path; for the brand reading, the CMO path. Terms used: cohort, perception cloud, reflection, metamerism, observer spectral profile.