•People seen against warm colors seem a little friendlier, so a warm color is a good option for anywhere you plan to hang out with others.
•People who have cool colors behind them seem more powerful, while people with warm colors behind them seem less powerful. Also, people in spaces where cooler colors predominate feel more powerful than those in spaces featuring warm colors. These links to power are important in offices.
•Warm colors do make it more likely we’ll feel hungry. This is a bad thing if you or someone you live with fights a daily battle with calories, but a very good thing if you are feeding a three-year-old who finds all foods, particularly ones you prepare, too disgusting to eat.
•Time seems to pass more slowly in rooms featuring warm colors and more quickly in ones that feature cool shades. These effects can be important in areas where people will need to wait or where they may not enjoy spending time.
•We’re drawn toward warm colors, so they’re great shades for the ends of long hallways that people need to walk down or for the wall behind a reception desk.
Colors can also be bright or dark. As mentioned earlier, brighter colors seem to have more white mixed into them than darker colors do, they could also be thought of as lighter colors:
•Spaces with lighter colored walls seem larger than ones with darker colored walls, even if their square footage is the same. If a wall is painted a lighter color, it seems farther away than when it is painted a darker color. The way that color affects apparent distance can be used to “right-shape” rooms that seem to have odd or undesirable dimensions. For example, make a very long and narrow room seem less oblong by painting the two walls that are farther from each other darker colors.
•Ceilings that are lighter colors seem farther from the floor than ceilings that are darker colors. Ceilings also seem higher when the walls are lighter colors than when they’re darker.
•We feel more comfortable when the darkest color in a space is on the floor under our feet, the lightest one is over our heads, and intermediary shades connect the two—this is the way colors are often distributed in nature. The ground is often a dark color, for example, and we stand on it. A dark rug on a white or very light-colored floor makes people feel more comfortable.
•When people are estimating the weight of an object, they are likely to feel that it weighs less if it’s a lighter color and more if it’s a darker one. Putting darker colors closer to the earth, lower on a wall, or on a piece of furniture, etc., and utilizing lighter colors higher up makes whatever is being viewed seem more stable.
•The same color paint will seem to be a darker if it’s painted on a surface with more texture.
Humans generally prefer to look at some hues and aren’t that keen on seeing others.
Across the planet, people are more likely to tell you that blues are their favorite colors than any other shades. That makes blues good options for walls if you are planning on selling your home soon.
Yellows, particularly very yellowy greens are the least popular colors worldwide.
It’s important to use preferred colors in a space whenever possible, because when we’re seeing preferred colors, smelling preferred smells, etc., we’re more likely to be in a good mood, which makes it more likely that we’ll be friendlier to other people, be better at problem-solving, and think more creatively, for starters, as discussed earlier.
Our minds don’t work as well in spaces filled with shades of gray and white; we’re so bored by them that our minds drift toward unpleasant thoughts. Humans find gray and white areas less pleasant places to be than ones that feature greens, blues, reds, oranges, purples, and even yellows.
When we see more saturated colors, we feel more stimulated, and brighter colors put us in a more upbeat mood. Colors that are not very saturated but are relatively bright are relaxing—a light sage green is an example of a familiar shade that meets these criteria. Not very saturated but bright colors are also good choices for places where people need to concentrate. To feel more invigorated, use colors that are really saturated but not very bright, like jewel tones—the color of a perfect rich emerald, for example. The bluish shade on the walls in the cover photo for this book is relaxing to look at, while the blue upholstery on the chair is a more energizing shade to view.
To structure future discussions of colors, we can use the following color family names:
Neutrals: The colors of sand, clouds, and light-colored stones
Hazy colors: Deeper grays and khaki greens
Pastels: Light colors and saturated shades
Jewel tones: Think sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and the jewel of all fruit, eggplants
Naturals: Greens and the less saturated and bright shades of more subdued flowers
Metallics: Shiny copper and brass colors
If looking at particular colors brings an intense association to mind, use that color only when that mental message is desirable within the intended context. You may link a particular shade of yellow with marvelous times your family had on your grandmother’s front porch because yellow vines grew along the walls there. That yellow should be in your living room. Do you have pleasant memories related to the distinctive blue on the inside walls of the church where you were married? Make sure to use that color somewhere in your home. If you have intense negative associations to a color, don’t use it in your home or office even if it’s trendy, or even if something that you’re shopping for is less expensive in that color. Color-memory links are made in a primordial part of our brain, and you will never be able to ignore or change negative associations.
If you’re color-blind, you should ask a friend what color something is in important situations, such as when you’re putting together an office that others will visit, so you don’t inadvertently signal something undesirable. If you are color-blind, you can still judge the saturation and brightness of various colors. Choose colors that are brighter and less saturated when the goal is relaxation and ones that aren’t as bright and are more saturated when you want to get a boost of energy from the world around you.
Colors Together and Patterns
Plenty of walls are painted a single color, and lots of sofas are covered in plain upholstery in only one shade, but not all of them. Scientists have also researched how the color combinations and patterns we see on our walls, sofas, floors, duvet covers, and more influence what’s going on in our heads.
Some color combinations seem more pleasant to our eyes than others. If you plan to use colors together in a space, assemble samples of all of them and attach them to a piece of board or heavy paper. Look at the planned combinations in a variety of lights to make sure they blend as well in practice as they do in theory.
Using slightly different tints of one color in a space can be relaxing, except if that one color is white/beige, as noted above. Non-white/beige monochrome environments can be good choices for in-home spas or meditation areas, for example.
When used together, colors across the color wheel from each other make us feel more energized (don’t forget the effects of saturation and brightness), and this effect is intensified if the colors used are very different in saturation and brightness. Reds and greens are across the color wheel from each other, and so are blues and oranges as well as yellows and purples. Pairs of colors beside each other on the color wheel (for example, purples and blues, blues and greens, greens and yellows, yellows and oranges, oranges and reds, and reds and purples) have the opposite effect on us when we use them together. It’s more pleasant when colors used together have approximately equal saturation levels but have a range of different brightness levels.
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