It is particular when the same subject appears in different shapes in a few days so I cannot but feel that it is a sign of a mysterious kind and that –of course- I must write a post about it. This time the subject is colors and how we think about them.
Last week I devoured the latest Haruki Murakami novel: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. For those who don’t know, Murakami is perhaps the most famous Japanese novelist right now, and among his most successful books you can find Sputnik Sweetheart, Norwegian Wood or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to name a few. The main character of the novel -Tsukuru Tazaki- is a person who feels colorless. When he is young, he feels that his group of friends has very defined personalities and ambitions, he thinks of them in terms of “color”. He defines himself as colorless, because he is a more ambiguous person without a very strong personality. Could you define a person with a color? Which color do you define yourself with? Have you ever felt like all the other people are very defined while you are not?
As color has been the subject I chose for this week, I read a little about it, and I have found an overdose of contradictory information about it. This is not strange because color has different cultural meanings, and in the same culture the same color could have different connotations depending on the situation. For example, black is usually the color of grief when someone dies, but it is also a color sometimes associated with sophistication.
There are study fields related to color, especially color psychology that deal with the meaning of color for people and how to use color when marketing different types of products. In official color psychology these are the most common associations with color in the Western societies.
Black: Sophistication, Death, Power, Evil
Grey: Stability, Security, Authority, maturity
Yellow: Joy, cheerfulness, intellect, energy, warmth, cowardice
White: freshness, hope, goodness, light, purity, cleanliness, simplicity
Red: danger, passion, romance, style, excitement, urgency, energy
Blue: Peace, stability calmness confidence tranquility sincerity
Green: Life, growth, environment, healing, money, safety, envy
Pink: romance, compassion, beauty, love, friendship
Purple: luxury, dignity, wisdom, spirituality, vision, magic
Do these colors mean to you the same things? Do you feel there are many differences between your point of views of color and the official ones? What color are you?
Regarding color, I also read in Elpais.es an interesting article on how we relate blue for boys and pink for girls. In theory, most parents try to educate their children without all these influences: blue isn’t necessarily masculine and pink isn’t necessarily feminine. In fact, at the beginning of the 20 Century it was the opposite. Pink was for boys because it came from red and red meant Energy for them (Men were supposed to be energetic at the time…) Why do you think we identify pink for girls and blue for boys now? Do you think it makes any sense?
TheSpeakingClub 