Photo by Sharon Pittaway
How often have you heard children discussing their favorite color? But you’ve probably never stopped to ask them why they like this color, or how their favorite color makes them feel. They may not even know the answer …
Many of us take color for granted, yet every color we choose is revealing – from the clothes we wear to the color of our front door. According to Karen Haller, the leading expert in applied color & design psychology (the study and application of how color influences thoughts, feelings and behavior), we are typically only about 20% conscious of the color choices we make. She talks to TLL about what certain colors mean and how we can incorporate cooler into our everyday lives to bring about positive outcomes.
The power of color
Karen, who has had color running through her veins since she was a little girl, says, “Color isn’t just something we see, but something we feel, experience and respond to every waking moment of our lives. Colhour is emotion. We make thousands of decisions each day based on color without even realizing”.
Since the ancient Egyptians, the healing and psychological effects of color have been studied from a scientific, mathematic, artistic, metaphysical and theological perspective. After WWII color was viewed as being purely visually decorative, superfluous and frivolous, and color psychology was all but forgotten.
For the past 20 years Karen has built on the more recent ideas of color theorist Angela Wright, working hard to put color psychology back on the map, and today works with prestigious global brands and industry designers, teaching them how they can use color to influence positive behavior.
A color revolution
Through Karen’s book, The Little Book of Color – How to Use the Psychology of Color to Transform Your Life, her mission is to show how color can express who we are and how we feel, so we can experience a greater sense of authentic self and wellbeing. She encourages us to celebrate the joy, fun and happiness that color brings into every moment of our lives.
Out of the blue
Not only does every color affect our feelings differently, but also every tint, tone and shade of the same color – and even within these ranges, there are subtle differences. For example:
Blue is the psychological primary color relating to the mind; each tone of blue can have very different psychological effects on the mind’s reactions and responses:
• Darker blues relate to focused concentration
• The vibrancy of turquoise tones relates to energising and awakening the mind
• Light blue relates to calming the mind.
Tickled pink
Pink, at the paler end of red, is physically soothing; conveying confidence and energy as the hue becomes stronger:
• Soft pinks (baby, dusty, nude) convey the softer compassionate, caring and nurturing qualities
• Colder, intense pinks (magenta) are a feistier, more independent, ‘I’m no one’s fool’, pink.
Home is where the heart is
There are so many areas of our lives that we can enhance using colour; the home is a great place to start. Karen offers these simple ways to inject colour into your home:
Your home, your personality – are you guilty of carefully curating an Instagrammable home; decorating it to make other people happy, rather than filling it with the objects and colours you love? Karen believes in using your home to reconnect back to yourself.
Bring in your personality and create a home that nurtures you.
Use colour to support how you want to think, feel and behave – way beyond creating a mood, we are looking to create positive behaviours to improve our life and wellbeing. We instinctively gravitate towards certain colour patterns, so find the one that expresses your personality. Using colour alone, you can instantly change the feel of a space and how you and others interact.
Find your colour confidence – if you know that you love a warm sky blue but a navy blue leaves you feeling cold, this is you instinctively responding to the nuances of colour and how they make you feel and behave. Trust this feeling when picking the tints, tones or shades for your home.
Enjoy colour – don’t be fearful of colour, or scared of making a mistake or ‘getting it wrong’. Experiment, have fun, enjoy. If it doesn’t feel right, then play around with the colour, the combination, the proportions and the placement until it feels right for you.
Through Karen’s passionate work, she is starting to see colour psychology gaining momentum; how people are beginning to understand how they can use it in their everyday lives. “But,” she says, “This is only the beginning … now I’m focusing on sharing how by connecting to our inner self at a deeper level, we are able to link patterns of colour and design to human behaviour”.