Adventures with Colors

I was going over my archived e-mails the other day, and discovered this draft post that I wrote back in 2014. I'm not sure if I ever published it, so I decided to dust it off, update it a little, and run it today. If you've seen it before, your memory is better than mine!

Fellow blogger Angel put up an interesting post a few years ago that discussed the (perhaps unwitting) signals a woman sends when she wears red or pink clothing. The idea is that she may be advertising her sexual availability or her period of prime fertility by her choice of clothing color, in much the same way that some female animals change the color of their external genitalia to signal that they are in their fertile period ("in heat," as the common expression goes). It's a subject that makes it into popular music as well ...

This is an interesting subject, and has applicability far beyond the examples Angel provided in her post. As I noted in the comment I left, red is often considered a "power color" (as in a man's wear of a red tie with a gray suit) that supposedly establishes dominance - possibly being indicative of a potential willingness to spill blood. Red also is the traditional color of danger. And it may have been no accident that the heroine of "Gone with the Wind" was named Scarlet.

Other colors send signals as well: for example, black often symbolizes death or mourning in western cultures (white sends the same message in Asia), while white in western cultures sends a message of purity or chastity. Black can be a color of hidden desire or of deep threat ...

Boys tend to be associated with blue; girls with pink. Cowards are yellow. People are green with envy or purple with rage. Green is the color associated with Islam. The most common colors for national flags are red, white, and blue.

In my own case, being color-blind (actually, color-deficient) makes life interesting. Most of the time, I can tell colors apart just fine if they're different enough ... my problem is with distinguishing dark colors or pastels from each other. Dark Blue, dark brown, and black look pretty much the same to me, as do most pastel shades, so I always try to have Agnes check over my clothes before we go out so I won't look too garish in public. Unfortunately, she isn't always there to save me from myself. A while back, we needed new protective covers for our iPads, and she sent me to the store to buy them. She wanted a red one, which I found successfully, but the bright yellow one that I bought for myself turned out to be green, or so I'm told.

So, have fun with colors, and remember that they really don't mean much when associated with your skin. Or anyone else's, either.

Have a colorful day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo