The reference one-photon absorption spectrum computed for solutes 1 and 2 in water (Figure 2, black lines) is compared with the three approximate models using only the first snapshot from the MD simulations. This is done to compare the effect of replacing water molecules described by QM and demoting them to classical models as explained in the computational details section above. Focusing initially on solute 1 (Figure ), the effect of replacing all 50 water molecules in the QM region with TIP3P water (W1) is observed to reproduce the overall features of the absorption spectrum with three peaks at 5.2, 5.9 and 6.8 eV, respectively. It is here noted that the spectrum is shifted 0.1-0.2 eV to the right for all peaks and that using TIP3P water fails to reproduce the shoulder observed on the central peak at around 6.2 eV. On the other hand, using either the polarizable WAT water model (W2) or the polarizable M2P2 model (W3), this shoulder is reproduced. Additionally, it is also observed that the peak positions are much better reproduced (0.0-0.1 eV), especially for the first two peaks. This indicates that mutual polarization effects between solute and solvents are the major contributor to reproduce these low-lying excitations. The improvement of using WAT or M2P2 over TIP3P for solute 1 is also evident when evaluating eq 13 where the computed deviations to the reference are 0.72, 0.45 and 0.16 for W1, W2 and W3, respectively. The absorption spectrum for solute 2 (Figure ) shows only one major peak in the low energy area (3.3-3.4 eV) while several peaks of lower intensity are observed at higher energies (4.3-6.2 eV). Here, it is observed that all models reproduce the placement and height of the first peak. TIP3P (W1) shows several deficiencies with the peaks in the rest of the spectrum, whereas the two other models (W2 and W3) reproduce the spectrum to a better extent. There is, however, an indication that for M2P2 there might be overpolarization effects because the major peak position is shifted 0.1 eV to a peak position of 3.5 eV. The latter is also evident when evaluating eq 13 where the observed deviations are 0.59, 0.52 and 0.63 for W1, W2 and W3, respectively, i.e., overall slightly worse than for the neutral solute.