It has proven tricky to decipher a healthy brain’s behavioral psychology: each day brings a set of exhilarating heights or numbing lows, based on nothing but pure chance: what coffee one drank, how they woke up, was there a symphony of drills below their window at 6am?
Even trickier is proving to be finding scientific evidence to back the colour psychology theory. My goal is to discover if the choice of colour in architecture, interior and product design is scientifically proven to influence moods and behaviors. One of my main motivations is my personal curiosity about colour; the other is the success of my design career.
What has always driven my self-proclaimed-colour-expert butt up the wall is the lack of any objective information, which solidly supports the colour psychology theory. And, while I go off creating commercial colour palettes for the big apparel money makers on a bit of trend research and a lot of ‘design intuition’, I just have to ask: ‘Is there anything apart from the 10$-at-Amazon colour wheel and the 10000$ WGSN subscription that can give a designer solid credibility when selling a colour pitch?’
I desperately need the numbers on my side, so I get lost in the Google matrix in the hope of finding an answer in any of the published studies from the past two centuries.
And So, It Begins
The first time we know of someone assigning psychological meaning to colour is 1810, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe invented the Theory of Colors, which reflected the writer’s intuitive, as supposed to scientific, viewpoint that different colours represent specific sensations. ‘The red-yellow gives an impression of warmth and gladness, since it represents the hue of the intenser glow of fire’, he writes.
From a current perspective, however, his work on the theory of colour has a few significant plot holes. He goes on about the qualities of certain colours, while completely dismissing others as ‘unnecessary’. Purple, for example, is one of the tones, quite popular in today’s product design and a dominating one in many aspects of both architecture and interiors, even though it was theoretically renounced by Goethe.
In the contemporary world of marketing and design, on the other hand, colour is often described as a tool to be studied and used intentionally, in order to convey emotions, atmospheres, meaning, relate to certain historical events, unite communities and even make a certain object or service more desirable.
Colour is also used as a means of communication: prime examples are traffic signs and lights, online purchase buttons, and UX design in general, which more efficiently navigates us through certain web scenarios. Many argue that it is exactly due to its psychological effect that colour has become such an efficient marketing tool.
Apart from communication, colour theorists are also trying to figure out why certain colours are more popular than others when it comes to objects.
What the said colour theory prescribes is, for example, that black, white and silver are the predominant shades for a car, surpassing the purchasing influence of their more saturated counterparts by miles (no pun intended). Similar colours are also purchased in electronics and computers, however, when it comes to apparel and footwear, silver makes way for other tones such as browns, blues, and reds.
Colour psychology theorists claim that this is because of the different messages colours convey: using the example of silver: it is often prescribed the qualities of trustworthiness, and sportiness, simultaneously making the object seem sleek and futuristic.
Apart form consumer behaviour, colours are said to influence people’s mood, emotional response, even physical wellbeing.
Red, for one, is connected to both sensations of excitement and hunger, and feelings of anger even heightened heart rate and strain. For the controversial emotional response that red triggers, it is often used to draw attention. Such is the case with road signs, traffic lights, call-to-action purchasing buttons on websites, but also fast-food chain branding, and marketing of some of the best-seller brands, such as Netflix and Coca Cola.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, blue is often described as calming, though sometimes it relates to sadness or apathy. The colour is also said to evoke trustworthiness, integrity, loyalty, and for these said qualities, it is integrated into the design of police uniforms, bank logos, hospital garments and interiors. Other psychological side effects of blue include increased ability to concentrate and problem-solve, which explains its overuse in educational facilities and corporate meeting rooms.
Similarly to blue, green is often used to induce relaxation and concentration, but it communicates growth and new beginnings, too. This colour is the basis of health and environmental marketing. Branding a product as organic or eco-friendly is so deeply rooted in green, that the consumers instinctively associate green with environmental sustainability. Because of this, the colour has become somewhat synonymous with greenwashing in the cases when the product in question’s only actual link to green is the cash it banks from false advertisement.
Apart from eco-friendliness, green is often used to convey cleanliness, hence why it is cleaning companies’ go-to branding colour. The sensation of growth, associated with the colour green also translates into startup branding, as well as financial charts, making it the most commonly used colour in design.
Comparatively scarce is, in contrast, the use of yellow, as it is somewhat particular. It is often connected to activity, creativity and warmth and is thought to stimulate the left side of the brain, though in most of its tones, yellow is quite bright and easily catches attention. For this reason, it is used to communicate caution, such as in the case of traffic lights and some road signs.
Its neighbor, orange, is also a colour, representative of creativity, enthusiasm and joy, used to attract attention, however, culturally and historically, it is also connected to Buddhism, which is why today it speaks for spiritual enlightenment and positive change.
Brown, orange’s darker counterpart, is the earliest colour seen in interiors, architecture, clothing and footwear. It is synonymous with earth, and nature, and one of the easiest and cheapest to achieve. Today, brown speaks for stability, comfort, relaxation, ruggedness and masculinity. It is still popular in home décor and both the food and product design industry, as it communicates connectivity to nature, biologically grown ingredients, and reliability.
Other popular colours since the dawn of time are black and white. Black, which was historically easy to achieve, is presently one of the hardest colours to dye, due to the synthetic, hydrophobic structure of most modern materials. In product design, it is thought to give off the sensation of sleekness, control, exclusivity and authority. In Western cultures, it also signals grief, while in the East, this messaging falls to the colour white.
Aside from that, white is often related to purity and cleanliness, and in design and architecture, it is used to achieve minimalism. The less popular mixture of the two colours: grey, is widely associated with neutrality, practicality and professionalism, however, being too politically correct, it often lacks an edge and is, hence, labelled dull and uninspiring.
Another very popular colour in interior design is silver. Owners of objects in silver undoubtedly think of themselves as sophisticated, modern and techy. With the onset of yet another y2k wave in design, many Gen Z representatives opt for silver, as this gives them an elusive trend-setter aura.
Speaking of popularity, one cannot deny the pull of pink. It was formerly associated with femininity, however, gender fluidity has kicked this notion’s ass, putting pink in the center of colour trend charts with claims that it represents versatility, boldness and energy. Its pastel tones, on the other hand, are associated with softness and calmness, and so widely used in baby products and cosmetics. Precisely because of this affiliation, many prisons and hospitals have, somewhat unsuccessfully, adopted pink as their wall colour, making a prime example of why I question the colour psychology theory. Pink is not only quite a particular coluor, but when splashed across multiple walls, it can have a somewhat… nauseating effect.
Another questionable application of the colour theory is the use of cyan, often integrated in biotech and technology startup bradning. It is said to communicate calmness, growth and optimism, but to my eyes, its only achievement is asthenopia.
And finally, the 1810s’ colour outcast, purple has proven one of the most successful colours of 2023. Not only iPhone buyers, but also royal families all over the world would disagree with Goethe: purple, as the hardest colour for Egyptians to achieve, symbolizes royalty, luxury, status, and a link between the physical and spiritual world.
Luxury brands and the hospitality industry are quick to utilize purple in large design areas, communicating lushness, exclusivity, imagination and youth.
The Science? Behind Colour
Colour is also a bearer of historical meaning. This is why, put in different cultural scenarios, colour has a plethora of connotations. In recent decades, there have been more than one historical fiasco, which incorporate colour theory with varying levels of success.
In the 1970s, for example, researcher Alexander Schauss, deducting from pink’s calming effect, persuaded a naval correctional facility to paint detention cells pink. Although some texts claim his venture achieved its purpose of calming the cellmates, and reducing aggravation, some colour researchers warn against putting too much trust in this colour psychology, as evidence is still insufficient to make clear deductions.
A positive side effect of Schauss’ experiment, however, proves to be the birth of a specific pink tone: P-618, and later called Baker-Miller Pink. It emerged as the first cellmate colour and is now used by many believers in the colour theory. One can still come across various names and versions of this tone, some dubbing it Drunk Tank Pink, others Cool Down Pink.
Going down the rabbit hole of colour theory, we brush shoulders with various claims made historically about the influence of colour on people’s behaviour.
One such claim comes from the 1970s, when an experiment was made in multiple hitchhiking scenarios. A female hitchhiker was dressed in a variety of t-shirt colours, and the study, unsurprisingly, found that she was picked up mostly when she was wearing a red t-shirt. This does prove that the colour red has an influence on drivers’ decision to stop, but it might be rather influenced by the brightness and visibility of the colour rather than its psychological effect per se.
Circling back to wall decor, one can find a rather astounding amount of small independent experiments, proving, though with an ambiguous sample size, that wall colour brings out certain behaviours in humans. Red, for example, was found useful when executing a dull, repetitive task. According to this experiment, the colour kept the individuals alert and allowed them to re-focus on the task at hand.
More creative tasks, on the other hand, like brainstorming, creative writing or strategizing were found to be more successfully executed in blue-coloured rooms, as they stimulate the left, creative part of the brain.
Those small experiments, however, often prove inconclusive in the big scale of colour research, as colour perception is thought of as a very individual experience. Introverts, for one, are a lot more susceptible to external influences, including colour. So, the effect a certain room setting has on their brain psychology would be rather different to the one it has on a person, less influenced by changes in their external environment.
One industry, applying colour psychology, however, shows conclusive results of the influence colour has on our brains: food! There is a clear effect of colour perception on people’s taste and flavour sensation.
An immigrant in a couple of countries, I have always wondered why food that looks appetizing to me as an Eastern European evokes curiosity in English and, at times, pure disgust in Swiss. Most of it is due to our cultural and social associations to food’s texture, flavour, and, yes, colour.
Psychologist at the University of Oxford and author of a book on the science of eating, Charles Spence, focuses his studies on how our senses come together in creating the experience of eating, and he finds many of our associations are connected to cultural factors such as familiarity with certain textures and ingredients, but also more prosaic influences like marketing exposure and packaging.
A leg of the same industry, the wine business has had its fair share of colour experimentation. Aside from the colour of wine itself, which was perceived as more qualitative, tastier and expensive the darker shade of red it is, bottle and label colours were found to have a big influence on wine buyer’s purchasing decision too.
Labels in black and red, as well as darker bottles seemed more popular amongst participants, regardless of the wine contents, making a 7$ bottle’s perceived value close to the one of a 40$ bottle. Thank God for Vivino!
Aside form taste, colour is proven to have influence on the perception of other senses. A popular amongst them is touch. According to Atefeh Yazdanparast, associate professor at Clark University’s School of Business, for the successful sell of an item, the physical tactile sensation is just as important as the visual impact of a product. “90% of our initial product assessments are based on colour,” adds Yazdanparast.
She focuses her research on the social psychology of consumer decision making and in recent research of hers, she and her colleagues asked volunteers to evaluate images of products, the purchasing influence of which is based in haptics: towels, bedsheets, furniture. During the study, two items in the same colour, but with different lightness, were compared.
When asked which item they would describe as softest, in 91.2% of the cases the lightest shade was selected. “We noticed that yes, the colour lightness results in higher anticipated softness, which translates into higher purchase intention.” The majority of the sampled participant pool was also willing to pay more for the objects they perceived as being softer.
Yazdanparast makes the conclusion, therefore, that, when unable to assess the quality of softness via skin receptors, humans compensate with the visual signals of colour. This seems to be a pattern, employed by marketeers, who bank on the visual perception of a product when selling goods online.
Not only softness in products, but also the interpretation of graphs and charts is influenced by colour intensity. One of the world’s leading researchers in colour, psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Karen Schloss’s research focuses on the reason people favour certain colours over others.
Her findings point that data graphs often communicate information via colour intensity. ‘People infer that darker colours map to larger quantities, which has been used very well in most of the pandemic maps I’ve seen – more cases, or fatalities, represented with darker colours,’.
While a useful tool for more efficient communication, colour lightness can also result in misinterpretation of information in cases, where graphed information is only displayed in the span of seconds. Regardless of the data displayed, ‘you’re going to interpret dark is more, not light is more’.
As I touched upon before, colour perception has a lot to do with the cultural background of the individuals, experiencing the colour.
Apart from learned behaviour in lightness, perception and interpretation, humans employ their background in their general take on colour. A 2020 study (Jonauskaite D, Abu-Akel A, Dael N, et al. Universal patterns in color-emotion associations are further shaped by linguistic and geographic proximity. Psychol Sci. 2020;31(10):1245-1260.) sampled 4598 participants from 30 different countries to survey their emotional association with colours.
While curious, the results were unsurprising with 51% associating the colour black primarily with sadness, 43% connecting white with a sense of relief, 68% assigning the connotation of love to the colour red, 50% to pink, 35% linking blue to relief as well, 39% making the association between green and contentment, 52% assigning the meaning of joy to yellow and 44% to orange, 25% connecting purple with pleasure, and 36% linking brown to disgust.
Even though this research quantifies a bigger group’s feelings towards a particular colour, the experience of each of them remains deeply personal and cultural. White, for example, connected by most participants with relief, symbolizes mourning in many Eastern cultures.
Turns out, apart from what is known to us about colours historically, ‘little theoretical or empirical work has been conducted to date on color’s influence on psychological functioning, and the work that has been done has been driven mostly by practical concerns, not scientific rigor.’, note researchers Andrew Elliot and Markus Maier, confirming my suspicion.
Therefore, contemporary colour therapy finds most of its practice rooted back in ancient Egyptican and Chinese cultures. Sometimes referred to as colorology, or chromotherapy, it employs the following approach:
To stimulate the body and mind, as well as to increase blood circulation, the patient is put in a red environment. Observing yellow, on the other hand, is prescribed to stimulate nerves and purify the body. Orange is used to heal lungs, but also to increase energy levels, while blue surroundings soothe illnesses and pain, and combat feelings of post-traumatic stress and fatigue. Skin problems are often treated with blue’s darker and more saturated neighbour, indigo.
Apart from treating a condition, colour theory prescribes different tones’ impact in a variety of surprising ways, including the placebo effect of greater pain relief, connected to white-coloured pain killers as opposed to their coloured counterparts, and the faster reaction of athletes to colour red, which ultimately betters their performance.
Such psychological effects are often employed by colour forecasters like WGSN, Pantone, and Coloro, who pick their trending colours based on their correlation with future psychology. Tones and their lightness, hue and saturation often hint to global political events like financial recessions, for example, which indicate non-risk buying behaviour and, consequentially, increased spending on classic colours. On other occasions, numbers stand behind the purchasing history of a certain colour, like is the case of pinks and pastels, which have historically sold well in the industries of cosmetics, yoga, spa and wellness.
When it comes to attempts to verify one universal colour psychology, however, many of the claims ‘lack substantiation in terms of empirical support, exhibit fundamental flaws (such as causal oversimplification and subjective validation), and may include factoids presented as facts,’ says Zena O’Connor, a faculty member of the Department of Architecture, Design, and Planning at the University of Sydney.
In big part, therefore, colour theory remains subjective. The reason why blue is the most liked colour, for example is rooted in many people’s holiday memories, relating to envisions of blue seas and blue skies. There isn’t, however, a universal way to connect colours with individuals’ psychological response. This is precisely the reason why, as long as humans’ personality differentiation is reflected in their colour perception, there could never be conclusive evidence supporting the colour theory.
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