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Psychology of Color: Summer 2010
 Summer is fast approaching. What a great time to freshen up any room with a coat of paint. Seize the opportunity and nurture yourself with color. But what color?
When it comes to your home, the single most important factor to evaluate is your own personal relationship to color. Individual color preferences are largely based on memories from the past. Happy times growing up in a yellow room may lead to a love of yellow in adulthood. And, while we are on the topic of yellow, here are some of my favorites for interiors.
The human reaction to color is first a psychological one. Color is a catalyst for evoking moods and feelings. No one can encounter color without a reaction of some kind, however subtle. And color is more than a stimulus that we perceive in the external world. Picture a tomato. You aren’t seeing red wave lengths; you are picturing red in your mind. You are experiencing color cognitively. Experiencing color means both visual perception and one that stimulates other senses. Visualize a lemon and your mouth starts to water. It is fascinating to think about the impact of color on our senses and our psyches.
It’s truly important to surround yourself with the colors that make you feel most comfortable. Fashion trends and styles may be a part of the equation, but your first priority is to get in touch with those colors that really make you personally feel good.
A balance between unity and complexity is the first and most important rule in the design of beneficial environments.
 Human beings can only take so much visual stimuli. If the environment is under stimulating, if there is no variety, it is monotonous and can cause restlessness, irritation and difficulty in concentrating. If it is overly stimulating, if there is too much strong color, too high a brightness or too much visual pattern, it can cause an unpleasant result that is confusing, demands voluntary and involuntary attention and an increase in heart rate as well as changes in breathing.
A knowledge of the relationships between harmony, contrast and values of color result in an environment that is balanced and unified without too much complexity, nor too much monotony.
 A trained color consultant is hired by individual clients, architects and developers to evaluate more than personal color preferences. Consultants from the International Association of Color Consultants/Designers (IACC) take a cross-disciplinary approach to help make a complex range of color decisions. Design principals such as evaluating the quality of light, geographic location, climate, architectural style, the creation of unity and harmony, and a host of other factors must be considered. Having read about the psychological effects of color above, you can see why a consultant’s knowledge of these effects is particularly important in relation to environments where color choice can have a strong impact on the user (schools, hospitals, restaurants, hotel rooms, etc).
 Frank Mahnke, president of the (IACC) was the first person to define an objective process for color selection in the built environment. His approach requires the evaluation of six distinct criteria:
Biological responses to color (color, pattern, light are all communicators that form an impression on the occupant that will result in a reaction)
Cultural influences and mannerisms (i.e., saffron robes of Buddhist monks)
Style and fashion trends (come and go, change and evolve)
Collective unconscious (millions of years of knowledge stored in our genetic building plan; a predisposition to experience our world as our ancestors did)
Conscious symbolism (e.g. we associate blue with sky, green with nature)
Personal reactions (influenced by all of the above)
Whether you use a professional consultant or tackle the selection process yourself, choose your colors wisely and it will bring beauty, harmony and joy to your home this summer and always.
Best Wishes,
--Bonnie
Bonnie was recently appointed second vice-president of the International Association of Color Consultant/ Designers-North America (IACC-NA) |
