A Commentary on Color

Back when I colored with crayons, I used to do this funny thing where I’d go out of my way to separate the blue crayon from the red crayon and keep it next to the pink one when I’d put them back in the box.

I seemed to have picked up on notions of jealousy and love triangles and personified my crayons: pink and red were fighting over being with blue, and red, being the evil one in my mind, didn’t deserve to be with him.

When I think back on it now, I laugh at how strongly I felt about this red and pink rivalry, but I’m also a bit amazed at how much I associated the colors with genders and feelings. Blue was masculine, pink and red were feminine. Pink was softer, kinder while red was wilder, more potent.

It’s funny how we associate such strong symbols and emotions with colors, but how did this come to be?

Do we naturally associate colors with certain meanings or is it all just a product of social conditioning?

To unpack how we respond to color, we first need to trace the origins of what we see (and what we don’t).

So much of what we believe and feel and experience is shaped by what we see. But we forget that what we see is shaped specifically by what our eyes can detect. And what our eyes can detect is closely linked to what would be helpful for the survival of our species.

There is a quite a bit of variation in what different species can detect. Most mammals can only detect a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum and are only able to distinguish between blues and greens. Most birds perceive more — they are able to further distinguish reds and also detect ultraviolet light.

Humans have trichromatic vision, meaning that we can distinguish between red, blue, and green. We inherited this trait from our ape ancestors who evolved from dichromatic (just blue and green) to trichromatic vision, although it’s not clear when and why.

Scientists posit that one source of evolutionary pressure to detect red might have come from its utility in identifying which fruits are ripe enough to eat since red fruits stand out against a green leafy background.

Another hypothesis is that seeing red allows apes (and other primates with bare-skinned faces) to detect social and emotional signals. Think turning red in the face when you’re angry or (in the case of some primates) exhibiting female ovulation by displaying a red bottom.

So, our color vision is very heavily shaped by evolution. But what about the emotions and symbols we assign certain colors? Are those entirely influenced by social cues or do they have biological links, as well?

Turns out that, while most color symbolism is a social construct (and I’ll get into this further later), there are some associations that date back to when we were just simple organisms floating in a soup.

Like plants, these organisms thrived on sunlight but too much of it was fatal. To regulate their intake, they would only rise to the ocean’s surface to feed during sunrise or sunset since the rays were easier to absorb when the sky was orange because they had longer wavelengths. When they detected a blue sky, they would stay settled at the bottom of the ocean. Interestingly, researchers argue that humans still respond to reds and blues in a similar way — feeling excited when exposed to red and calmed by blues.

Apart from this one possibly hardwired association with red and blue, most other color symbolism is entirely influenced by social cues. And what is interesting to me is how deeply these associations can impact our psyche, even if we’ve made them up quite recently.

Take our response to pink, for example. In a Navy prison research study from the 1970s, 98.7 percent

of prisoners who spent 15 minutes confined in a cell painted pink reported feeling weaker after. Being surrounded by pink seemed to have an enervating effect on them, likely because they strongly associated the color with femininity.

But interestingly, pink only became a color for girls in the 1940s. In the decades prior, department stores were actually selling pink for boys and blue for girls. But when marketers made the switch, so did the stereotypes.

One of the more harmful associations I’ve come across is our exaltation of white and denigration of black.

Our speech is littered with allusions to this — dark times precede brighter days, people who wear “white hats” are honorable, and we avoid blacklists and black marks. These metaphors seem to have originated from daily references — nights can be dark and dangerous, dirty water is muddy and dark — but in a world with racism, such color associations can be damaging.

Interestingly, while many societies developed colorist attitudes after colonialism and slavery, some societies already had preferences for fairer skin, mainly linked to class. Since people from lower classes spent more time working in the fields, they were more likely to be tan and hence, darker-skinned, while upper class folk, who were mostly indoors, were fairer. These class-based associations of light and dark skin were further exacerbated by white supremacy in later years.

All of this tells me that color, and the meaning we ascribe to it, is powerful.

But we must remember that our eyes only detect a fraction of the world around us. Our construct of beauty is defined by the colors available to us, which means that there is a lot of beauty we just cannot see.

And while it may seem like our associations with colors are fixed, they are more malleable than we think.

Perhaps this quick jaunt through the history of color can push you to see things a little differently, to bring out the powerful in pink and the brilliance in black.