What's In A Colour?

Pigments are powerful. From revealing your personality to influencing your mood, there really is more to colour than meets the eye.

- Sonia Zadro

Could the colours you love say something about the kind of person you are? Can colour affect you emotionally and could you even harness a colour to promote your wellbeing? Science and ancient wisdom suggest that colour can indeed influence your mood and reveal your personality, as well as heal your mind, body and soul.

In every moment you are bombarded by a plethora of seven million colours, as this is how many shades of colour your eyes are able to distinguish. This electromagnetic light hits the retina of your eye and is interpreted by your brain as colour. When you see a blue object, you actually see an object absorbing all the colours of the spectrum except blue, which is reflected back to you. There are 120 million rods in your eyes to perceive various shades of black, grey and white while a further 6 million rods perceive colour and detail.

You might not be affected by the electromagnetic energy of colour in the extreme way you are affected by say, radiation waves, but it still has a powerful effect on you. Research suggests even non-seeing people respond physiologically to colour in a similar way to sighted people.

Once a colour has registered in your brain, research says it affects your mood, productivity at work and how you feel. Even the colours you favour say something about the kind of person you are.

Colour and mood

The notion that colour affects your mood is embedded in our language. We use terms like “feeling blue”, “seeing red”, “green with envy” or “viewing things through rose-coloured glasses”. The meaning you attribute to colour is also culturally influenced. For example, yellow can represent courage in Japan, mourning in Burma, wisdom in Buddhism and royalty in China. In the book Your True Colors, Catherine Shovlin outlines findings from experiments looking at the effects of colours on you emotionally and these are outlined below.