Life In Colour
We live our lives in colour from our earliest days – in Western cultures ‘pink for a girl’ or ‘blue for a boy’. Colour plays a big part in everything we do. We use it both as a badge of identity and a way of expressing our individuality through decoration. And we use different colours to send out very different messages.
Identity
People need a sense of group identity. Look at the schoolboy in the photo. From his colourful traditional dress, other people in Peru know he comes from the Quechua community. We wear uniforms at school and work, and we dress in our favourite sports team’s colours to say the same thing – we belong to this group.
Decoration
The Huli villager in the photo is getting ready for a local festival. He’s applying the traditional colours of red, yellow and black in his own personal pattern. Face-painting is an important part of the celebrations, and these days people are starting to experiment with brightly coloured synthetic paints as well as traditional colours. In fashion-conscious Europe, the ‘in’ colour changes every season. This autumn, for example, women are wearing shades of purple and lilac.
Messages
Marketing experts understand the power of colour very well. Packaging and labels in eye-catching colours stand out on the supermarket shelf. And companies always select the colour of their brand very carefully – a calm blue for a bank you can trust, dark green says quality and sophistication, or brown and green means eco-friendliness.