I love color theory, I always considered this my strength as an art student. I could mix paint colors well and figure out how to reproduce a color I saw. I remember in college reading the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman at the same time I was taking some interior design classes. Both reinforced the idea that yellow is the worst color for a bedroom, it is incredibly unsettling in a sleep environment. After that, I was hooked on color theory and how color affects mood and reflects your personality.

Then I start to spiral when I think about all the different ways people see color. The blue I see may not look the same way to the person next to me, different religions and cultures give color all kinds of different meanings…and on and on.

As a kid, my favorite color was red. In college, I became very drawn to blues. Now I seem to have an orange thing going that’s pretty new, but I just can’t get enough of it. And people tell me I wear green more than any other color, where I thought I wore a lot of pink. I thought about tying this in to a program for the kids, so I looked around for what colors say about your personality. According to Wikipedia’s Color Symbolism and Psychology article, here are a few associations (positive and negative):

Red: passion, love, anger, excitement, ambition
Orange: energy, balance, enthusiasm, aggression, desire
Yellow: happiness, earth, optimism, idealism, cowardice, illness
Green: life, nature, fertility, youth, inexperience, jealousy, greed
Blue: peace, unity, harmony, confidence, coldness, depression, men
Purple: spirituality, creativity, wisdom, arrogance, exaggeration
Pink: spring, gratitude, appreciation, marriage, homosexuality, femininity (the most positive list)
Brown: boldness, depth, stability, tradition, boorishness, poverty
Grey: elegance, humility, respect, boredom, decay, formality
Black: absence, modernity, power, sophistication, death, anonymity
White: purity, peace, innocence, sterility, criticism, surrender

I also took this color quiz just for fun, which I thought was pretty telling.