It took around 600 million years for the eye to develop to see movement, form and then colour. Different organisms can detect different waves of light according to their environmental needs. We humans can detect visible light, while other waves are harmful to our eyes.
I describe the evolution of seeing here
After this evolution of seeing colour, comes the interpretation of colour. It would begin with the things closely related to survival and reproduction: detecting food for survival (rotting or dead food has a different colour to lush healthy food), and bright colours for reproduction along with displays to attract mates.
For us humans, as far as we know, the colours have a more in depth effect on our physical bodies and minds, with more abstract meanings assigned to colours by society and tradition rather than for survival or reproduction.
The Psychology of Colour
The journey of where we are today with colour, begins with the philosophers and physicians and physicists who were doing research and writing up findings.
Timeline of the discoveries and meanings of colour
490 BCE – Empedocles. Philosopher, divided up the colours into four elements of nature, earth, wind, fire, water.
460 BCE – Hippocrates. Physician, added four bodily fluids for colour: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, linking each one with the elements from above.
384 BCE – Aristotle. Developed the first real theory of colour that dominated until Newton. Had the four elements, with white as light and black as absence of.
1666 CE – Newton and his discoveries. He gave the first circular diagram of colour, creating the colour wheel and complementary colours
1810 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Poet and novelist, published a treatise on colour in 1810 indicating that colour can evoke feelings.
1875 – Carl Jung. Psychiatrist. Allocated colour to personality.
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton, born 1642 in England. His works include discoveries of gravity and the laws of motion. He experimented with light with his famous experiment in 1666, using a partition board with a pinhole in it and a glass prism. He observed how white light broke into the colours of the rainbow.
Optiks was his book from 1704 and he explained how colours are comprised of light rays that bend or refract at different angles when passing through a prism, so the colours separate. Violet bends the most with shortest wavelength. Red bends the least with longest wavelength. Middle is green.
He organised the colours into a collection of 7. He chose 7 because of the beliefs of the Ancient Greeks of 7 in connection with music, solar system and days of the week.
Organising colour
The way light splits into the rainbow and the subsequent study, many concepts have developed for organising colour that we humans have come up with and still apply in many disciplines today.
The colour wheel
Newton was the first to organise the colours on a wheel, giving rise to the concept of primary, secondary and tertiary colours. Also to complementary colours and subsequently, colour palettes.
Warm and cool
The reds, oranges and yellows are the warm colours. This is likely with the association of the visual colour of fire and the sun. Funny enough, with very high temperatures, visual colours go blue and white. The blues and purples are considered cool, likely with the sky, the sea and that feeling of icy blue. The middle is green, the colour of balance, harmony and growth. Nature would be the main source of this concept.
This is quite western and there is evidence across the world of these colours having different meaning depending on context and social customs. Upcoming in later articles.
Primary, secondary and tertiary colours
Primary colours are red, yellow and blue. Secondary are orange, green and purple. There are six tertiary, formed from mixing a primary with a secondary. This is a very basic system that is used in art and design.
Primary colours for tech are different. There is the RGB model of red, green and blue mirroring the photoreceptors in the eye. And the cmyk model which is a subtractive model made of cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
Physical effect of colour
When colour hits the cones, it transmit electrical signals to the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland areas of the brain. These areas of the brain also govern metabolism, appetite, body temperature, sleep, automatic nervous system amongst others. Colour can have a real physical experience.
Different colours are said to have very different effects on a physical level but also on a culture level.
Language of colour
Different cultures and societies across time and space have different names and interpretations for colour. Some languages have more than eleven basic words for colour, some less. Russian and Greek have two words for blue. Hungarian has two words to distinguish between darker and lighter red. In a lot of languages, blue and green are used interchangeably. In some tribes, the colour names become even simpler.
How we see colours does depend on the language we use to describe it. Language first seems to distinguish between light and dark. Then the red will come next as a word to describe colour, then green, then yellow and blue. This does coincide with wavelengths of light and the first ones we see, long wave length of red first, shortest wave length of blue last. It is said the more words we have for colours, the more see them and use them.
Language can also evolve as people of a particular area are exposed to new colours in their everyday life. The colour orange wasn’t in English until the fruit was imported to Britain in the Middle Ages. The first recorded use of the word was in 1512. Pink is the most recent name of a colour to come into the English language in 1600s.
Cultural meanings
Red was used for nobility and royalty in the middle ages as it was expensive, made of expensive dyes. As soon as cheaper options became available, it lost it touch. Purple was once for royalty only, not anymore. In China, yellow was exclusively worn by the emperor and his family and this has changed with time.
Yellow was worn by the American suffragettes as part of their movements. It was also a ‘non believer’ to be worn by Christian and Jews by the Caliph in 18th century Medina. The Nazi’s also required Jews to wear yellow badges as prelude to sending them to concentration camps. In medieval times, it was seen as the colour of cowardice.
Red is the colour of Santa Claus, red riding hood, lipsticks, the devil and the luscious red carpet.
Envy is green because of Shakespeare in the West. In France though, it’s represented with yellow. For the Chinese its red and for Japanese it’s purple.
Blue eyes were once not to be trusted, people who had blue eyes were seen to be of dubious character. Yet blue can be associated with being sad, with blue blood and high class citizens and blue collar workers who were manual labourers wearing blue clothing to work as it hid dirt better than white.
It seems that with everything, changes happened in the meaning of colour with new discoveries, innovations and changes in society. This does demonstrate that colour has more subjective elements than objective. Colours have certain wavelengths and are absorbed within objects to reveal the colour of that object, however the meaning and interpretation are really open-ended
