Our minds are powerful. These mammalian brains can use non-physical forces to make us physically feel better or worse. The way we perceive the external world has the potential to affect our moods, our preferences and even our experiences. The way we process most of this data is though our eyes. Many scientists have tried to explain how we perceive different colors with our eyes. One of the earliest was Sir Isaac Newton. Before he used the prism, in one of his earliest experiments, he stuck a long sewing needle with a blunt point into his eye socket as far back as he could tolerate. With a shard of metal lodged between eye and bone, he recorded seeing colored circles and other “visual sensations.” Most of us would refer to them as the fireworks we see when we rub our eyes firmly. Thanks in part to his curiosity, we no longer need to repeat the experiment to know that our eyes contain three types of photoreceptor cells. These red, green, and blue cones are responsible for everything that we see. As each cone absorbs its color of light, it produces an electrical signal. These signals travel to our brains, filling our worlds with color. In that regard, we don’t see color, we experience color. I want to take a moment to explore the universal power of colors.
Colors Don’t Exist
This blows my mind, but it’s true. Scientists and poets have tried to describe colors in many ways. None of them have suitably explained what color truly is. There is no way to describe red without saying that is has red-ness, which is just begging the question. It’s hard to convince ourselves that colors don’t exist—at least not in any literal sense, because we have never known life without them. Pumpkins and oranges are not orange, and the sky and sea are not blue. What does exist is light. Light is real. Light can be measured, held, and even bent outside of our brains while color only exists within our mind. The different frequencies of rebounded energy that make up light trick our minds into experiencing color. We can never know if what we experience as blue is the same as how a dog sees blue or if blue even exists to a bee. We often say that the sky is blue, but at night it is black and at dawn it is red. There is no way to confirm when blue has turned to black because there is nothing there to turn colors. There is no way to take a sample color for analysis because there is no color, and no substance to measure. Trying to grab a magenta Sharpy beam at a Pink concert will only prove that the color was never there in the first place. This makes the human experience of color uniquely personal.
Color Affects Us Differently
A worldwide YouGov survey revealed that blue is the most popular color in 10 countries across four continents, including China. There are several theories as to why this seems to be universally true. The most prominent theories have to do with calming nature of a blue sky and the purity of deep blue water. Clean water would confer an evolutionary benefit to those who could find it. Even today, marketing companies and PR firms have taken advantage of this truth. They use the blue colors to express calm and relaxation. In several studies, placebo pills were used to see if the color of the pill coating had any effect on the person taking them. Almost universally, the red pills were thought to be stimulants while the blue pills were thought to be sleeping tablets. The participants in the trial truly felt sleepier after taking the blue pills. One of the notable exceptions was in Italy. Italian men became more stimulated by the blue pills. The leading hypothesis on this anomaly has to do with the local soccer team. “Azzurri” is both the name and the color of the Italian national football team. For most Italian men, blue represents excitement, stimulation, and exhilaration. Whereas blue is usually a somber color, Italian men have overcome evolutionary processes through social conditioning. When it comes to color choices, location matters.
Color Affects Preferences
In a variation of the placebo pill tests, scientists wanted to know if color affects our food preferences as well. In an often-repeated study, four bowls of identical Jell-O are prepared. The only difference between the bowls is the color of the food dye. The tastes are the same, but the colors are different. Red, yellow, green, and purple are most often used. With shocking regularity, participants will claim that the red is strawberry and sweet. They will claim that the yellow is lemony and bitter. The green will be apple and tart. Most commonly, the purple is the least favored Jell-O, and few people can describe the taste. After the experiment, when the taste-testers are told that the four bowls are all the same, they will be shocked and even argumentative. It’s not that they were fooled by the experimenters, it’s that they were fooled by their own brain. We taste with our eyes long before we taste with our mouths. One of the best examples of color preference is Cheetos. Without the napalm orange artificial coloring of Cheetos, their actual manufactured color is grey. The grey color is so unappealing that they would be almost impossible to market. Even though the cheesy dust stains everything an obnoxious orange, people tolerate the color because it is appealing to their eyes. When choosing a color for a song, the same can be true. People can respond to the color selection long before the chorus starts.
Why Does This Matter?
If you have read this far, you are probably wondering, “I’m a lighting designer, why does the color of placebos matter to me?” To answer that question, I have one more study to describe. Three identical white rooms were constructed for a cocktail party to entertain several test subjects. The only difference between the rooms was the lighting: one red, one blue, and one yellow. Their heart rates, food consumption, and interactions were all measured. People in the yellow room ate and drank twice as much as the people in the other rooms despite not feeling hungry. People in the blue room were the most sedate. They moved the least, but they stayed the longest. In the blue room, people tended to cluster around the outsides and avoided human contact, while the red room and yellow rooms seemed to encourage human interaction. People reported being drawn to the yellow room by a margin of two-to-one. We can use the findings from these experiments to direct the experiences of our clients and customers. By knowing how humans experience colors, we can harness this power to catch the attention and improve the experiences of audiences. These studies infer that the perfect non-Italian venue would have yellow lighting in the entrance to gain attention, red lights around the bars to stimulate consumption, and blue lights in the main areas to calm and relax the patrons.
