How We Emotionally Respond to Color
Every color has meaning. Beyond the history and hue of each color, is how we as people feel when we see or remember that color. A color’s story is individual for each of us.
We can discuss all day how red is passion and green is wealth and blue is peace, but the truth is our response to color is so much more than cultural stories and mores. Those colors hold memories. They invoke smells and feelings and personal truths.
That pale pink isn’t just a faded red used in child nurseries. It is your first experience of cotton candy at a carnival with your dad when you were six. That emerald green Is the fresh cut grass after a summer rain shower.
That grey-blue is the aroma of a fishy shore during a trip to the west coast and reminds you of that dinner when you had too much coconut rum.
When I see a white wall, I think of a new rental apartment. I see impermanence and renewal. Change and growth. With every new set of white walls was a new adventure.
With yellow I see a blue plastic wading pool because we had homemade lemonade on hot summer days. The yellow of the lemons instantly takes me back to those blue plastic pools you buy at the hardware store.
Orange perhaps makes people think of sunsets.
Personally, I see orange, and I feel the heat of flickering flames. Those flames in a campfire are the midnight backdrop to listening to my uncles talk politics, economics, and philosophy while passing a bottle of bourbon.
Some of us may feel calm with cool colors, but more soothed by warm tones. We might fall victim to trends and not understand our distaste for a room after implementing the latest color scheme.
Some of us associate green with the traditional themes of money or illness. But others see nature and earth.
Do the warm tones induce feelings of warmth via home and hearth? Or do they make you think of mud and filth?
There are hundreds of resources discussing the historical and cultural stories behind the meanings of various colors, but emotions are different. A cultural meaning is general. An emotional meaning is personal. We each have our own life story, so our color story is personal as well. There is no right or wrong emotion associated with color. Those old notions no longer apply in our interconnected global age of digital socialization. The more we connect, communicate, and interact, the more we can also differentiate and celebrate our own individual stories.