In polar solvents, we find that the presence of a counterion in the calculation has only minor influence on the predicted spectral lineshapes, with the calculated absorption spectrum of CV in methanol in absence of a counterion agreeing well with both the experimental spectrum and the spectrum computed by explicitly including a Cl - in the dynamics. An analysis of the ion dynamics reveals that Cl -is screened by a solvation shell of methanol, thus diminishing its effect on the optical spectrum. Additionally, our analysis demonstrates that the dominant factor responsible for the symmetry breaking of CV and the resulting splitting of S 1 and S 2 peaks in methanol is the non-covalent interaction between the CV and the solvent environment rather than torsional disorder, in contrast to the results presented in a recent study. In nonpolar solvents, we find that CV preferentially forms a contact ion configuration with Cl -, leading to strong symmetry breaking and a substantially larger S 1 -S 2 splitting than in methanol. Interestingly, our results demonstrate that the chromophore-ion configurations sampled during the MD in toluene, where the Cl -is preferentially located equidistant between two N atoms, are qualitatively different to the configurations sampled in vacuum, where the Cl -is more preferentially associated with a single N . This highlights that an explicit treatment of the condensed phase environment, as provided by MD sampling, is crucial in describing the com- plex interplay between chromophore, counterion and solvent dynamics that shapes the optical spectrum in this system. Additionally, given that the position of the counterion breaks the symmetry of the electron density on the CV molecule (Table ), static force fields are likely insufficient in describing their interactions, highlighting the necessity of performing long QM/MM dynamics, which can be computationally costly. The computed spectra for CV in methanol are in good agreement with the experimental lineshape. In toluene, our calculations overestimate the experimentally observed S 1 -S 2 splitting. However, given the sensitivity of the splitting on the choice of DFT functional for the contact ion pair configurations due to the significant amount of CT character in the S 2 state (see Fig. ), we can likely ascribe this discrepancy to an error in the chosen DFT functional, rather than a shortcoming of the cumulant method.