Psychology of Color
Choosing a color to embellish your walls sounds easy enough. Since the colors of your room are a booming echo of your personality, one would simply assume that their favorite color should be their first choice. Aesthetic values undoubtedly are important, but we never seem to consider the influence a certain color can have upon our mental health.
Colors have more control over our brains than we may appreciate and realize. The wrong color can leave us feeling as though we’ve sunk into the pits of an acute depression or risen above the clouds in intense happiness. Gaining knowledge about a color and its impact before choosing it for your personal space is fairly undiscovered; something this article will highlight as you learn about six colors which could affect your own tones.
1. Risky Red
A great conversation stimulator, a room with red walls has the ability to entice excitement, raise one’s energy levels and increase any appetite. For this reason, the location for an attention-grabbing bold color such as this would be a dining room, living room, or family room, where it can keep discussions alive. In the photo above, the interior designers at Bayberry Cottage have expertly incorporated a crimson wall in a family room. Conversations must be boisterous in this room!
2. Beautiful Blue
The serene, calming hues of a beautiful soft blue as pictured above, can offer a relaxing atmosphere and even lower your blood pressure. It is said that blues can also ease the mind and induce creativity. For these reasons, the ideal location for such a tranquilizing color would be a bathroom or a bedroom. A more intense tone as exampled below by Lumar Interiors, however, could also be used in a social area such as your living room.
3. Gorgeous Green
The natural tone of the gorgeous green goes easy on the eyes, making it an increasingly popular color in the interior design world. Though the color itself has many different shades and tones which all evoke distinct emotions, they all share a common ground: green is the color of concentration. Best used in an office or personal workspace, this color is sure to bring an abundance of inspiration and productivity when it is most needed.
4. Youthful Yellow
The yellow wavelength is respectively vast and fundamentally stimulating. It is the color which resonates with the logical side of the brain, which reverberates in our mental faculties and creates mental agility and perception. Furthermore, a respectable shade of yellow can generate feelings of happiness within us. Though some people may use this color for a bedroom or living room, it is recommended to be applied to a kitchen or bathroom, where it can be uplifting and motivating.
5. Overpowering Orange
Just like the color red, when you walk into a room with orange walls, you will immediately feel an energetic increase. Orange awakens the senses and causes excitement and the need to start moving. This is why orange is absolutely ideal for a gym or workout room, rather than a more personal space such as a bedroom.
6. Naked Neutrals
Arguably the most popular color palette used when it comes to interior design, neutral colors such as whites, greys and beiges adorn many people’s walls. To various cultures however, these tones have various meanings. For example, white is seen by Westerners’ as a pure, ‘clean’ color, and so having it in your home would provide you with a sense of ease and relaxation.
Contradicting this, the Chinese and Japanese traditionally view white as the shade of death and mourning. Needless to say, such an association would thrust a haunting feeling of morbidity upon any homeowner.
All-neutral schemes fall in and out of fashion, but their advantage lies in their flexibility. You can always add colorful decor to liven things up as shown above by designer Betty Wasserman. The most beneficial fact about using neutrals is that they are flattering anywhere and can enhance any room. Although these colors are essentially the safest and unadventurous, at the same time they will produce the most sophisticated and elegant homes.
Color is a universal, nonverbal language, and we all instinctively know how to speak it. What color you paint your walls isn’t just a matter of aesthetics; it’s a tool that can be leveraged to affect emotions and behavior.
With all of this in mind, it is still of great importance to remember that wall color not only affects one’s psychological mood but undeniably the overall appearance of a home. Paint is inexpensive and impermanent, and so if you fail to capture the atmosphere and look you were striving for there, of course, will always be an opportunity to take out your brushes and start again.
