Pigment of Your Imagination
When it comes to our homes, there is nothing that has such a powerfully transformative effect as colour. Colour can turn where we live from just the place we go back to at the end of the day into a supportive, comfortable haven that expresses and reflects who we truly are … and has a profound effect on our emotional wellbeing and on the behaviours of everyone we live with.” This big claim sets the stage for The Little Book of Colour, by Karen Haller. This information-packed guide distills Haller’s practice as a colour psychologist into a readable, illuminating tour through the role that colour plays in every area of our lives, from where we sleep to where we work, and the enormous impact that it has on every facet of our wellbeing, from how we eat to how well we sleep. It also looks at why so many of us give so little thought to a phenomenon that impacts us so strongly. As Haller points out, we know that the colour we encounter in our lived environments can change our life experience profoundly – “So why aren’t more of us using it?”
Haller describes in her book how “established research into theories of colour and psychology suggests that each colour has specific effects that influences us on all levels – emotional, mental and physical. In other words, different wavelengths of light trigger different feelings.” In conversation, she expands further on this, detailing the three ways that we relate to colour: personal association, where “you might follow a certain football team, so you love that red”; colour symbolism, or “what a culture believes because someone they revere has told them that a certain colour means something”. But on top of these conscious associations, there is a universal, instinctive reaction which cuts across cultures: “For example, red might make us think of danger because we’ve been told that. But physically, we also have a stimulating reaction to it – everything becomes very physical.” This can be good in certain doses, but as with all colours, its effects can become overstimulating, and this is where the balancing craft of colour psychology comes in. “Every colour has positive and adverse traits, and will connect to how you’re feeling at the time.”
This is very far from a new concept. As far back as 490BC, the Greek philosopher Empedocles saw the creation of all life as analogous to the blending of new colours from existing ones. Aristotle and Galen developed their own theories in turn of what colour was and how it functioned; Newton first codified the colour spectrum; Goethe’s 1,400-page 1810 treatise on the subject detailed colour as an emotional experience and looked for laws of colour harmony; Carl Jung looked at linking colour types to personality traits, while Kandinsky taught students at the Bauhaus to think about how and why an artist gravitated towards certain colours.
“"Every colour has positive and adverse traits, and will connect to how you’re feeling at the time." – Karen Haller”
However, attitudes to thinking about colour, and specifically how we live with it in our own domestic spaces, changed drastically after world war two. “All the learning that the scientists and artists were bringing together before the war got lost or forgotten,” says Haller. “Precedence was given to practicality, the need to get houses up, for things to be functional. Colour was sidelined as it was seen as being decorative and superfluous. And it came at the cost of us as humans and how we feel emotionally.”
As Haller sees it, this ultimately is why colour psychology is so important, and why the way we shape and decorate our living spaces is more than just an aesthetic question. “It’s about the human, about our personality. It’s a form of expression that communicates how we feel on the inside all the time.”
As Haller talks about her work, its role in creating decent, healthy living spaces seems both more important, but also self-evident. “Often we live in a house which is styled by someone else; you look to your neighbours; you follow what’s in fashion. People are scared to use colour, afraid to get it wrong … but really what they’re afraid of is showing who they really are. They’re afraid that other people won’t like them, so a lot of people decorate their homes to feel acceptable.”
“"It doesn’t matter if nobody else likes your home because they don’t live in it – it needs to work for you, not anybody else." – Karen Haller”
For this reason, while Haller’s book is crammed with insight and inspiration, she steers clear of one-size-fits-all rules and recommendations. Her one pushback is around the ubiquitous use of Brilliant White in interiors. “There’ll be lots of colours which don’t resonate with us, but they’re all natural. But Brilliant White is a flat, dead, man-made colour – nobody can live with it in a positive way. Normally, when you put a white next to any other colour, it changes. Brilliant White doesn’t change and we’re constantly trying to calibrate it, but we can’t. So it can lead to us feeling quite exhausted, there’s no energy in it.”
Ultimately, Haller is pleased that the system she has advocated for more than a decade is finally coming to prominence. “Colour has been absolutely relegated in design training, but people are picking up on it now … and if the word’s getting out, then good.” Her final advice is the simplest, and essential for anyone living in the city today: “It doesn’t matter if nobody else likes your home because they don’t live in it – it needs to work for you, not anybody else.”
