Red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple, etc. are names that we learn at an early age and that we use to identify the colors we perceive. It's easy. However, considering the millions of hues that we can distinguish, few names are available to our panel.
Strange.
Unless you are an experienced painter, few names come to mind like cinnabar red, indigo blue, larch green, Naples yellow, etc. The nuances and hues seem to be fixed in a second plane. Is it the same for everyone, all histories, all cultures? Is it universal? Do we all perceive colors in the same way? Maybe we do. Using controlled measurements, a recent study concludes that color categorization is universal (Zeki, Javier et al. 2019).
What can change, however, is our relationship to colors: the meaning given to them, the symbols that we attribute to them, and even... the emotions associated to them. A recent survey (in 55 countries) asked respondents to rate 12 colors according to several emotions (joy, shame, fear, etc.). Analyzing the answers for yellow, they noticed that people associate joy with it according to their country of residence: for example, 87.7% of Finns surveyed, compared to 5.7% of Egyptians (Jonauskaite 2019).
Thus, if the categories of colors seem universal, the importance we attach to them varies according to our relationship with the environment.
Festival of colors displayed on the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon wall, during the Fête des Lumières 2019. @mba_lyon
* Categorization : The mental activity of placing a set of objects in different categories according to their similarities or common criteria.
References
Jonauskaite, D. et al (2019). "The sun is no fun without rain: Physical environments affect how we feel about yellow across 55 countries." Journal of Environmental Psychology.
Zeki, S., et al. (2019). "The biological basis of the experience and categorization of colour." Eur J Neurosci.
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