Seeing red describes a person enraged. Feeling blue suggests some one is despondent. A green movement is about regenerative, sustainable practice to promote life. Colors are taken for granted. Yet, color is a survival aid for most species. Organisms evolved colors to both attract and repel predators. For human beings, colors saturate everything from our moods, our marketing, our foods and even our codes. Red means stop, Green means go and yellow means proceed carefully, not just in traffic lights, but in language, in emergency symbols and in packaging.
Color and language are greatly inter-related, but it has been shown to write the color orange in bright green letters, or vice-versa, tricks the brain and slows down cognition. In tests to demonstrate this, people more often than not report the color they see and not the color they read. People are not aware of their color sense consciously, most of the time, but it is always there.
This suggests, that for all our language capabilities, the human species is still an animal that has a color sense that is very deep. Color always has been a cue for animals to determine which foods are ripe, and which are still, after all literally green. Color also shows an animal in touch with senses, what food is no longer good.
In music human beings found that the blues speak to a broken heart, or often loneliness. This is because blue corresponds to cold, empty and sterile landscapes.
Red and bright sunny colors such as orange, yellow and pink lift spirits as do sunny summer days. Red is also the color of passion, love, romance and desire. This too, is due to nature’s gifts of “ripening” Red lips engorged with blood are just more kissable and a big turn on for many animals, of course. At the same time, the color red also is a warning of danger. This is appropriate too, as a sexual cue, because sex has many consequences, such as the danger of rejection, of transgression, of heedlessness and of course the danger and excitement of falling in love. Because red is the passion color it is also used to warn dangers of emergency. First aid symbols, blood symbols and traffic light signals are all red, so are top alert indicators.
Colors that calm are the pastels. To calm a tendency toward rowdiness, blues and greens are utilized. To suggest a calm of hominess and warmth, yellows and blushy oranges are used. To suggest utter blandness, and even boredom, people use beige, cream and neutral colors. These neutral colors suggest almost no color at all, and realtors love them because they supposedly allow potential buyers to envision their own taste in colors against a backdrop of total blankness.
Color, then is invented by nature to soothe, calm, feed, warn, invigorate, excite, create relationships, and attract all beings to common inter-woven inter-dependence. The green movement, for example, is all about people realizing their belonging as natural beings in nature. Once the belonging is realized, the regenerative powers of color are not just sensual, but vital to survival.
