Living Color

The office didn’t have a color scheme per se. The walls and carpet featured a shade of dirty beige known as I-have-no-hope, the metal staircase was painted dead-body gray, and the dropped ceiling was done in dingy-Styrofoam-flecked-with-debris. When I toiled in this grim warren after college, I didn’t know anything about the effect of color on mood. And while dirty beige probably can’t be held completely accountable for the mass depression that permeated the office, lately I’ve started to wonder: Was it a coincidence that while working in these dank, colorless surroundings my boss and his wife split up, three employees made a habit of drinking beer mid-afternoon at their desks, and I took to wearing a shapeless brown corduroy jumper?

Frank H. Mahnke, an environmental designer based in Geneva and San Diego and one of the world’s leading color consultants, would say it was no coincidence at all. “The public underestimates the impact color has on emotional states at home, at school, in workplaces, and in health-care facilities,” he says. Even many architects and interior designers, he adds, haven’t been trained in the psychological and physiological effects of color.

Alternative health practitioners, though, have long been attuned to the power of color. Their mission might not sound as technical as Mahnke’s, but they also believe that color can affect a person’s state of mind and perhaps even his or her health. Like aromatherapy, color awareness work teaches people to use an often-overlooked aspect of their senses to promote well-being.

In Berkeley, California, for example, teachers at the Buddhist Nyingma Institute draw on ancient Tibetan theories to explain the colors of the meditation room: midnight blue to calm the mind, with vertical lines of deep red to wake up the consciousness. The colors are a silent presence designed to move observers to states of compassion and wisdom. In Tempe, Arizona, lifestyle coach and registered nurse Nadine Campbell teaches clients to release tension and promote healing by looking at the colors associated with the seven chakras, or energy centers, and breathing deeply. (For a firsthand look at another type of color therapy, see “My Encounter with Color Therapy,” page 85.) And at a color reading at Mii amo Spa in Sedona, Arizona, massage therapist Bhakta Ruttiger discusses what her clients’ choices of colored oils reveal about themselves and their potential.

While no one’s claiming that color can cure cancer, science has established that color isn’t just pretty—it’s a mood-changing, blood-pressure-altering phenomenon. “Its most important use is for relaxation,” says Springfield, Missouri, physician Norm Shealy, founder of the American Holistic Medical Association. “And since 75 percent or more of illnesses are the result of stress, relaxing can help prevent them.”

Indeed, the effects of color can be profound, says Mahnke, who warns that we surround ourselves with drab at our peril. In his landmark book, Color and Light in Man-made Environments, coauthored with his father, Rudolf, he writes, “[People] subjected to [visual] under-stimulation showed symptoms of restlessness, excessive emotional response, difficulty in concentration, irritation, and, in some cases, a variety of more extreme reactions.”

More extreme reactions? I saw one of those in that long-ago dreary office: One day my boss pulled out a hammer and shattered a Lucite paperweight. Dingy paint was starting to sound like a legal defense.

Good-bye, lethal beige
Sadly, that job was not my last exposure to lethal beige. Work environments are out of my control, but I’ve paid to live in apartments done in a lifeless palette of brown and gray. In a house I once owned, I waited ten years before doing something about the shade of white best described as sickly mouse on the living room walls. Hope prevails, though. Last year my partner and I bought a new house, and, courtesy of our realtor, an interior designer gave us a color consultation, steering us into the world of paints with names like pumpkin chiffon and chaste fern. Happiness is a lot to expect from a can of paint, but my pumpkin walls deliver: They’re like a visual antidepressant.

The chaste fern hue in my office, though, is a different story. It’s a lovely pale green, but the room doesn’t get much light, and in the dimness, the green sometimes looks washed out, even—good God—beige. After six months of living with it, I’ve started my own quest to find the perfect color. I begin with Mahnke, whose book leads me directly into the field of color psychology—the study of how and why colors affect our bodies and our emotions.

“Color, which is created by light, is . . . a form of energy, and this energy affects body function just as it influences mind and emotion,” he writes. When I read this, a door swings open. Of course: Color is not just sitting there on the wall, it’s entering my brain through my eyes and giving, or subtracting, physical, mental, and emotional energy.

To figure out what this means to the body, psychology researcher Robert Gerard, then at the University of California at Los Angeles, did an experiment in which he flashed red, blue, and white lights at research subjects. When subjects looked at the red light, their blood pressure rose, as did breathing rates, the amount of sweat on palms, and the frequency of eyeblinks. When subjects looked at blue light, their blood pressure dropped, as did the amount of blinking and breathing. In short, they mellowed.

Gerard proposed that the longer-wavelength colors—generally the “warm” colors like red, orange, and yellow—rev us up, while the “cooler colors,” which have shorter wavelengths, calm us down. It makes sense: This is why red is considered an aggressive, lively color and why the matador waves a red cape in front of the bull. As for the cool colors, I now understand the idea behind the “green room” where people at television studios wait before going on camera: It eases anxiety.

The trick is to figure out how you want to feel in a particular room and then paint and decorate accordingly. One factor to consider is the temperature of the room. Is it too sunny and hot or too dark and cold? Surprisingly, color can make a real difference in how we perceive temperature. Research subjects seated in a blue-green room felt cold at 59 degrees; these same subjects in a red-orange room didn’t feel cold until the temperature fell to 52 degrees, according to experiments described by the late Johannes Itten, a pioneering color therapist, in his book The Elements of Color.

Indeed, when a North Carolina hotel hired Pittsburgh color designer Nada Napoletan Rutka to choose room colors, managers told her they had been bombarded with complaints about east side rooms that were too cold and west side rooms that were too hot. But all the rooms were set to be the same temperature by a central heating and cooling system.

Her solution: “For the rooms on the east side I chose warm colors and for rooms on the west, cool colors,” she says. “Complaints about the temperature went down significantly.”

What’s your favorite color?
While our perception of warm and cool colors is thought to be universal, some quirks of color psychology are particular to each individual. According to Mahnke, we react to color by traveling a twisty path through our physical sensations, the collective unconscious, cultural norms, and finally, our specific personal history with a certain color. We may find white houses to be clean and fresh because we grew up in one, for instance, or find them sterile and dull for the same reason.

As for me, I’m just about starving for yellow. It’s my small piece of the Caribbean sunshine under which I’d be living if there was any justice in the world. According to Debra A. Wade, an interior designer in Eugene, Oregon, we gravitate toward certain colors for how they affect us spiritually, emotionally, and physically. She has a theory, however unscientific, about my longing for yellow. “Yellow stimulates the desire to create and communicate,” she says. I’m not ready to dye my hair blond to test this notion, but I do detect a glimmer of truth in it.

But which yellow to choose for my office, where I do most of my creating and communicating? I’m ready for something bold, or so I think.

As an experiment, I buy three large tea mugs that are sunny yellow in a Caribbean sort of way. The color is a saturated yellow, which means it’s undiluted by black, gray, or white. Swell color for a mug, but here’s the question: Would a large swath of this make me feel carefree and happy in a Doris Day, que sera sera way? Or would it make me cringe?

I feel a cringe coming on.

In a cautious move toward another of my favorite citrus colors, I buy an orange mouse pad. This, too, seems a step beyond my comfort zone. I don’t like pure orange as much as I think I do; it’s got to be yellowish orange.

Bonnie Rosser Krims, author of Perfect Palettes for Painting Rooms, encourages me to take a chance. Forget the mug and the mouse pad, she suggests: Slap some paint on the wall and live with it for a few days.

She’s right, I know, but I need more time to experiment. I find myself drawn to the forces of lime green: Maybe I should paint one wall lime green and one yellow? Dare I?

Putting my office decision on hold, I start smaller. I order gorgeous soup bowls, willow green on the outside and tomato red on the inside. I trade in my sheer lip balm for Naked Grape; I put a bowl of oranges on a copper table.

Small gestures, but each one puts the force of color in my favor: giving me energy, making me happy, clearing my mind and revitalizing my spirit.
There’s no turning back. If I ever have to toil in a dingy beige office again, I’ll be the one in the lime-green pantsuit.

Your Color Horoscope
A preference for a certain color reveals much about your inner desires, according to the theories of German color psychologist Heinrich Frieling. To learn what color has to tell you, use this chart, developed by interior designer Debra A. Wade, and choose the shade you find most appealing. The text that matches that color shows qualities you have or would like more of in your life.

Turquoise Insight, progressive thinking, healing
Red Self-motivation, leadership, generosity
Chartreuse Flexibility, growth, expansion
Pink Support, nurturance. sympathetic understanding
Black Self-sufficiency, individualism, protection
Burgundy Adventure, emotional play and expression
Green Clear perception, self-recognition, compassion
Orange Quick-thinking, intuition, independence
Yellow Communication, observation, analysis
Blue Clear thinking, diligence, organization
Mint Self-healing, tranquility, time-out
Indigo Self-reliance, clear and holistic thought
White Cleansing, protective, simplification
Gray Need a vacation, acute sensibility, calming
Purple Artistry, spirituality, culture
Yellow Orange Life-promoting creativity, quickness