Colourful Emotions

Winter is coming - although for now we are stuck in Autumn, one of my least favourite seasons.  I quite like Winter and I have a certain fondness for Spring.  Summer I was never really fussed on, the only reason I liked it when younger was because of the extended break from school for holidays.  The reason I was never keen on Summer however is primarily down to fashion.  I prefer Winter clothes, I feel a lot more comfortable in them and I can't wait for the weather to get cold enough to get back into my hoodies.

Thinking about Winter clothes I have felt my wardrobe is in need of an upgrade.  At the moment it is dominated by basic bitch black.  As much as I love wearing black clothes, it does get a bit generic after a while.  This got me thinking about colours and emotions.  Specifically what a colour says about you.  I've read articles that centre around this idea and to be honest I have never really put much stock into them.  I did hear someone say they were feeling blue however and when I thought about that and the fact that I understood they intended it to mean they were feeling sad, I began to think about what emotions I would associate with colours.

Just as a point however, spoken and written, the emotion is conveyed, but I am still not convinced I connect the visual colour to these emotions.  Nevertheless I thought of the obvious ones first.  Red I would associate with anger, Green with envy, Blue with sadness - which is surprising since so many products seem to choose this as their default go-to colour.  In fact Blue as a generic colour is something we learn about in Human Computer Interface Design, it is considered the least offensive and most "neutral" colour you can use when designing an interface - the reason Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook et al chose it as the staple of their logos and their site designs initially.  If the default colour implies a default emotion, what does it say about the human race that our default emotion is sadness.

There are others that are harder to define, Orange for example isn't easy to associate an obvious emotion with, likewise Yellow, although personally I'd consider that a 'happy' colour but I don't think everyone would agree with me.  Purple, and White too are harder to define.

I realise for some people the choice of colour they wear will be less about the statement they want to make, and more about the aesthetic or colour coordination that they try to achieve when picking out what to wear, however, motivation isn't something that is always obvious.  The reason why you did something is usually the last thing people think about, with the first thing being what you did and how it impacted them or the impression it made on them. 

I'm in the mood for change, so for now I am simply left contemplating a colour scheme.