THE FASCINATION WITH BLUE COLORS & WHY PEOPLE LOVE BLUE

The ever-enchanting BLUE… The most popular color, according to polls across the world.

One recent study by Colorlib ranked blue, again, as the No 1 choice in US.

Designers know this, too. Most of their clients will choose blue for logos, because blue suggests honesty and loyalty. Let’s dive into the symbolism of blue and why so many people love it.

I always wondered why so many people would pick blue, but I have a theory. At least I used to, until I read another article, but I’ll come back to that article shortly.

Here’s my theory:

My hypothesis starts from that big firmament above us. It is, by far, the most prevalent natural occurrence anywhere you would turn your head around. Unless you live underground like a mole, the sky will always be half of the big panoramic view in which you navigate every day (the other half being the earth beneath your feet).

So, if the sky is blue (well, most of the time, depending on the weather), and you catch a glimpse of it on a daily basis, I believe that’s a pretty good reason to prefer blue. (Familiarity leads to preference). Humans learned to associate the sky with blue, freedom, supernatural and transcendent since ancient times.

Can you see blue if you don’t have a word for it, though?

Here comes a story that will turn my previous theory and your expectations upside down. This really cool Radiolab episode talks about several studies on how ancient people saw the colors around them.

Long story short, ancient languages did not have a word for “blue”. Neither the Greek (Homer describes the “wine-dark sea” in Odyssey), nor the Chinese, nor the Hindu (Vedic hymns talk incessantly about the skies, but no mention of blue…), nor the Hebrew, nor the Japanese, and so on. Everywhere you would look, the ancient texts described purple, red, black… but not blue. Except… the Egyptians, because they actually had developed a method for producing a blue pigment, through some really cool chemical reactions involving the most ubiquitous material they could get: the sand (more on this in my next post about blue). So the Egyptians did have a word for blue.

The verdict is still out there.

Yet…, if there was no word for blue in most languages, how could people know it was blue? There’s a lot of controversy around this story, including some unverified studies of a tribe in Africa that allegedly has a hard time seeing blue because they don’t have a word for it.

Of course, the fact that there was no word for blue in ancient languages doesn’t mean that people couldn’t actually perceive blue. Right? At least according to this post, the linguistic relativism is irrelevant. Ancient people might have seen the blue color, but still did not have a word for it.

In any case, my theory that people like blue so much because they’ve been naming the big thing above them as “blue” sky for millennia… still remains open for debate.

Blue is a beloved color, for a myriad of reasons.

Let’s start with the basic impressions of blue:

Blue as in the sky. Did you know that we see the sky as blue not because there is a sort of a blue pigment in the air particles, but because of the way the light gets scattered through the atmosphere? Blue is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. (according to this NASA short article).
Blue is the sea, the ocean, (another expanse that many of us living on the seacoast see on a daily basis — and paint… like my ‘masterpiece’ below 🙂 ). Both water and sky will impart a sense of infinity, freedom, liberation.

Jenness Beach, Rye, NH – Acrylic on canvas, Andreea Dumez.
Original painting and art prints available for purchase.

Blue flowers are more rare than other plant colors, and most plants that we see today as blue have actually been cultivated to appear as such, through scientific methods. The flowers that naturally look blue don’t actually possess blue pigments, but rather change the petal color through pH variations. Check this article out for more on blue flowers. Blue flowers suggest uniqueness, preciousness.

Some birds have impressive blue colors, like the bluebird species in North America, lots of birds in South America like parrots, macaws, plus the well-known peacock. Their unmatched beauty elevates the blue color to a royal status.

Bluebird Original acrylic painting by Andreea Dumez

Bluebird No 1, Original acrylic on wood, Andreea Dumez.
Original painting and art prints available for purchase.

If you think that flowers have a unique method for producing the blue color, think twice. The blue feathers have no blue pigment, either, just like flowers don’t carry a blue dye in their petals. We actually see a blue coloration in the feathers in a similar way with how we perceive the blue skies. Kind of similar, but not quite: according to the Smithsonian institute, it’s called a “structural color”, because light interacts with the 3-D arrangement of the feathers, making the red and yellow cancel each other out, while the blue light gets amplified.

Nature plays a lot of tricks on our eyes. Especially when it comes to blue.

In the winter, your shadow on the snow will look bluish. Impressionists painted the shaded areas and shadows primarily in blue hues.

There are also spectacular blue pigments, either from natural or synthetic sources. More on those in my next blog post (blue pigments deserve a separate chapter).

The photo below shows a sample of art supplies and materials from my studio. The blue rock inside the mortar is a genuine Lapis Lazuli semiprecious stone. The tube with the white cap on the right of the picture contains the actual lazurite powder, after a piece of the stone has been ground. The other vial with the black cap also contains lazurite powder — from Rublev Colours — a more refined and purified version with an intense blue hue. The pastel sticks on the bottom of the image come from my favorite brand, Sennelier.

More on the story of Lapis Lazuli blue and how it reached my studio from a far away place on the other side of the world, and then up on some icons that I painted, in my next blog post about blue pigments.

The more abstract meanings of blue

Blue can symbolize honesty, loyalty.
It is also the symbol of freedom, as the sky is a place of free flying and infinity.
Blue is stability and strength, because the blue sky will always be there. Mountains in the distance are aways blue, and they are always going to be there.
Johannes Itten said that “blue is always passive”. “Blue is contracted, introverted. As red is associated with blood, so is blue associated with the nervous system”.
Blue is passive because it recedes in the background. Leonardo da Vinci discovered that as objects are more distant from the eye, the more bluish they appear, due to the interposed layers of air particles.

Blue mountains receding in the background

That’s why blue looks beautiful as a background, and many TV stations will display blue backdrops behind their hosts. A room painted in blue feels more spacious than a room painted in red or yellow, which can feel more “snug”.

Blue is silence, tranquility. Blues calm the mind. Strong blues induce clear thoughts, while pale blues are soothing.
Blue points to transcendental, to another dimension. It is a spiritual color, aspiring to the infinity. In iconography, Virgin Mary is represented with red outer garments and blue clothes on the inside. This signifies her original human nature (the red) and her heavenly nature (the blue).

Blue is cold, red is warm. Winter has more blue tones than summer. A lot of blue in a home can make you feel more chill than if your walls were painted in yellow or other warm colors.
Blue in a room induces sleep and relaxation (maybe people invite more blue hues in their homes because they instinctively desire to counteract the stressful pace of modern life?)
Blue is nautical. Next to white and off-white or beige, it’s a refreshing combination evoking the seaside and the coastal atmosphere, taking you back to vacation nostalgia. The coastal interior design is rooted in this type of color palette:

The Ocean Path trail at Acadia. Original painting by Andreea Dumez.

“Acadia Ocean Path”, Original acrylic painting, Andreea Dumez.
Original painting and art prints available for purchase.

Blue has a lot of cultural meanings, as well.

Think of babies and how we dress them differently–boys vs girls. Nowadays, blue is considered masculine, pink feminine, although this was not the case until fairly recently in history.
Blue-blooded means aristocracy. On the other hand, a blue-collared worker is a manual laborer.
Blue has various meanings depending on the culture. Blue represents holiness in Judaism, it conveys patriotism on many flags, it’s the color of the Democratic Party in the US (a rather recent association).
Blue is the color of confidence, reliability and professionalism. That’s why a lot of companies use blue in their logos ( Think Walmart, Facebook, Ford, Dell, American Express, etc).
Blue curbs appetite, but increases productivity (and guess what: it’s the most used color in offices, including cooler lighting sources – now you know why!).

Blue has so many variations. Blue can shift into greenish or purple, but I’ll leave those hues for a separate discussion. Here are just a few examples of blue colors and their meaning.

I still like to think that the reason why blue is the most beloved color is because… it’s up there, in the sky. It’s stable, immutable, eternal. The sky never goes away.