Is 青色をしている different from 青い?


I recently learned 青色をしている as a synonym for 青い, but I don't have a good idea
of what the difference is, or even if there's any difference at all.

On [chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/8304422#8304422),
Flaw suggested the difference might be intrinsic quality (〜をしている） versus
incidental quality (青い）, but I don't have a good idea of what that means. I
found a [forum
thread](http://www.guidetojapanese.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=28352)
suggesting something similar, but I came away from that a bit confused--one
poster claimed it was intrinsic versus extrinsic but didn't explain what that
meant, and another said there is no difference in most cases.

So my question is: **what is the difference between 青い and 青色をしている?**




Besides the previous answers about the grammatical difference being adjective
or not, I think they are slightly different in some meaning. While both refers
to blue color, 青い is simply describing what it looks like, 青色をしている is more
focusing of the color itself.

For example,

  * あの自転車は青い = the bike is blue. (where the information of bike and blue are equally important to me)
  * あの自転車は青色をしている = the bike is in the color of blue/that bike has a blue color to it. (where the color is what I want to bring your attension to)




Besides the previous answers about the grammatical difference being adjective
or not, I think they are slightly different in some meaning. While both refers
to blue color, 青い is simply describing what it looks like, 青色をしている is more
focusing of the color itself.

For example,

  * あの自転車は青い = the bike is blue. (where the information of bike and blue are equally important to me)
  * あの自転車は青色をしている = the bike is in the color of blue/that bike has a blue color to it. (where the color is what I want to bring your attension to)

