The Psychology of Pretty Colors (Part 2)
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Part 2: Every Society Wants to Live Among Bright Colors.
<< Continued from PART 1 >>
Colorful interiors, paintings, cars, jewelry, and cereal boxes grab my attention and push my brain’s pleasure buttons. Peruvian weavers dye their textiles with the brightest chemicals they can get hold of. Mexicans villagers paint their houses pastel pink, green, and yellow. Every historic empire deployed laborers to collect or mine the brightest pigments available.
I might forget that every culture loves bright colors when I walk through an art museum’s ancient galleries. I pass the Classical statues — the stoic, white marble goddesses and charioteers — and I picture these all-white artifacts along the streets of ancient Greece and Rome. I picture them in the temples and the courtyards of rich politicians. And imagining these streets lined with so much white and grey leads me to doubt that residents of these drab, dusty places had any interest in color whatsoever.
The museum curators themselves didn’t know until the 2000s that Greeks and Romans painted their statues with bright primaries (the paint flaked away between then and now). If we’d time-travel to Ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome, we’d gawk at their multicolored statues. We’d even call some of their statues tacky, and better suited for Coney Island’s amusement parks than for an imperial courtyard. We’d learn quickly what the art museum’s Roman wing doesn’t tell us: that the ancient people were as color-obsessed as we are today.
Back in the art museum, I move further through its Western galleries. I get to the Middle Ages and Renaissance rooms, but the most famous paintings from this era look dull and somber to my eyes. I see Giottos, Da Vincis, and Bruegels painted in shades of brown. Look! Here’s a patch of faded yellow-green! Once more I think, People in the drab, dusty days of Bruegel didn’t like bright colors, while I compare Bruegel and Da Vinci to the electric hues of French Impressionism. But I’m mistaken again because the Impressionists (1800s) used colors that didn’t exist when Bruegel (1500s) was painting. He didn’t have access to labs that synthesized cadmium red and emerald green, so he settled on the brightest pigments available.
One of these Renaissance pigments was ultramarine blue. In those days, artists couldn’t use bright blue unless they ground down a rare gemstone, lapis lazuli. And this stone came from Afghanistan, so merchants had to cross the sea to reach it (ultramarine in Latin means “beyond the sea”).
When I understand that old Europe yearned for bright colors, I can imagine how thrilling the 1800s must have been for painters. So many electric new pigments came to the market, synthesized in factories from cheap chemicals. J.M.W. Turner’s favorite pigment had been Indian Yellow, which actually came not from a lab, but from the urine of mango-fed cows. However, as soon as barium yellow, viridian, chrome orange, and chrome scarlet came out, they were on his palette. These lab-produced pigments were so much deeper and more saturated than what came before. And they launched a sort of color revolution.
On Turner’s and Delacroix’s heels came the Impressionists (1870s-1890s), who shocked art collectors at first, but ultimately opened the gates for Abstract Expressionism (1940s) and Pop Art (1960s). Meanwhile, interiors of Western homes were getting more brightly saturated with color, as you’ve seen on shows like Mad Men. By the time Westerners reached the digital age, they were drowning in fully saturated yellows, reds, and violets.
Still, we haven’t reached peak color saturation. Manhattan, Chicago, Shanghai, and Singapore remain cities of silver and grey, spiced with a few accent colors. That could change next decade, if we begin to spend more of our lives in pixel worlds (where cobalt blue skyscrapers meet turquoise sidewalks, for example). That’s probably where we’re headed.
But in this decade, Westerners wear an awful lot of grey, beige, and brown — all this while drinking bitter coffee. These choices would stun our Stone Age ancestors, and they’d be doubly shocked when they realized we’re passing over bright colors and sweet foods that cost the same as our beige and bitter choices. We even dress ourselves in Pantone 448C sometimes. What gives?
One explanation is that we wear beige and brown because we’re hypersensitive to tackiness. I could be socially penalized for painting my house lime green or for dying my hair the same color. (Later, we’ll look at why someone might choose green or blue hair. It’s not chosen for its beauty. Rather, green hair announces you have such an abundance of self-assurance that you can afford to stir up the haters). For now, let’s just say I take no social risks by wearing Pantone 448C. It’s a safe color for times when I don’t want to stand out.
Sidestepping the haters is all well and good, but a lot of people genuinely like neutral colors and bitter coffee. George Clooney and Cate Blanchett wear quiet colors, and still they love the spotlight. However, Crayola’s market research team will remind us that George and Cate weren’t all about quiet colors when they were five, six, and seven years old. Something happened to them between then and now. The short version is: they were socially rewarded for dressing in the style of the upper class, whose members reject the brightly colored trappings of common folk. So, George and Cate learned to connect social status (and hence pleasure) with grey clothes. You may know people who went through the same process, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
Keep in mind, though, that George and Cate still like electric-green M&Ms better than grey ones. They’re probably quite happy with electric-yellow laundry detergent and dish soap. Thus they’ve learned to prefer grey in some categories, and bright colors in others. We’re seeing again that color preferences are domain-specific.
But how far can cultural learning carry us? Do you think we could train a child to associate spring green with decay? Perhaps it might be possible if we raised the child from birth in a VR-simulated world where brown and green were inverted. Plants change to spring-green as they rot and wither. The young research subjects might learn that brown forests and brown grass are beautiful, but I doubt it.
Getting a kid to link green with decay sounds less like science and more like science fiction. Children in the real world do grow up removed from greenery sometimes. Maybe they come from urban jungles built atop desert wastelands, in which case they live among mud, sand, aluminum, cement, and not much else. And even then, they experience an inexplicably unlearned desire for open fields of wildflowers.
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Takeaways and ideas for artists:
· Our color preferences are domain-specific.
· Artists who reproduce the ancient world should pay homage to their colorful statues and architecture.
· Designers of video game worlds, VR worlds, and other digital environments ought not to imitate the greys, tans, and browns of real-life cityscapes. Try pumping the color instead: teal skyscrapers rising from turquoise sidewalks.
· Designers of digital environments should try to incorporate more trees, plants, and flowers. Blur the boundary between indoor and outdoor.
· Painters, photographers, and designers who deal with summer landscapes will face “the green problem.” This means too much green can overwhelm the viewer. A solution: try desaturating your greens and pushing them towards gold or grey-purple.
· Architects should be highly attuned to the effects colors have on our moods. They should know that sky blue ceilings made students perform better on the SATs.
· Designers of consumer product goods should disregard colors’ effects on our moods. Instead, they should ask: Do these colors help my product stand out from all the other stuff in my category? What story do these colors tell about my product?
· If you design websites, packaging, or devices, stop defaulting flat, colored backgrounds. It’s not the best design solution every time. Sure a solid red background is the safe choice–it’s good clean, minimalist design. Problem is, everyone else is making the safe choice. They’re all choosing solid colored backgrounds. That means you’ll be unremarkable, forgettable, and invisible if you follow suit. So try a gutsier option — one that might look tacky if a designer less talented than you held the reigns. Instead of a plain-white background, could a mostly-white image work? And instead of a plain-red background, could a reddish texture do the job?
· Painters shouldn’t write off using flowers as subjects or design elements. Patrons have powerful instinctive connections to them, so it’s worth hunting for new styles and new treatments of this tired old subject.
