Color is a huge part of design, art, fashion, and our daily lives. Colors can have an affect on our heart rate, our emotional state, and our judgement. Here are some interesting facts about color.
Color Affects Our Judgement
According to color theorist Faber Birren in his Book Color Psychology And Color Therapy, if I were to get you to pick up two boxes, one red and one blue, that were exactly the same weight, you would believe that the red box was heavier than the blue one. Similarly, if you spent identical amounts of time in a blue room and a red room, you would believe you had been in the red room longer (presuming you didn’t have a watch).
Color Affects Our Depth Perception
OK, not to the extent that we’ll fall down the stairwell if it is painted blue, but we do perceive warm colors as being closer to us, and cool colors as farther away. Similarly, we see lighter colors as closer, and darker as farther away.
We Perceive Colors Differently
In his book Elements of Color, Johannes Itten tells us we each have our own “subjective color palette”, and that we are able to see more shades of colors that are within our subject palette than those that are not. So, I may be able to see more shades of blue than you, and you more shades of red than me.
We All Have Similar Taste In Colors
Studies have shown that regardless of gender, nationality, or culture, we all order our preference of colors in a predictable order, with only a small amount of variation. In adults the order from most to least preferred tends to be blue, red, green, violet, orange, yellow, while in children it is more often red, blue, green, violet, orange, yellow.
Color Can Be Kind Of Disgusting
Colors have to come from somewhere, and some of the places we have traditionally got pigments for paint and dye from can be downright creepy. Here are a few of the more bizarre places we’re historically got our colors from: the charred remains of dead bodies, the urine of cows that have been fed mango leaves, insect blood, and sea slug tears.
