How Color can Affect Your Mood

If you’re like most people, you already have a sense of how color affects your mood. If you’ve ever sat down and enjoyed a meal in a fast food restaurant, for instance, you may cognizant of how many of them have a bright-and-brash color scheme featuring mostly oranges and reds. This is a strategy designed to discourage people from hanging around — these places want to keep the flow of customers moving at a brisk pace, and it’s been proven to work. The same dynamic comes into play in subtler ways with the colors we choose to include in our home decor. 

The Psychology of Color 

Although it’s long been understood that individuals have favorite colors that have pleasant associations, color psychology itself is still a fairly new field. Although peer-reviewed research in this area remains scanty, industries that rely heavily on the use of color, such as art, marketing, and design have been putting the concept of color psychology to good use. Nonetheless, color psychology doesn’t have any universal tenets — how people respond to certain colors and even nuances within the same color is largely determined by culture and personal experience. For instance, in some Middle Eastern countries, the color white signifies mourning, while Western cultures associate it with purity.

The Effects of Color

Very generally speaking, colors on the red through yellow spectrum are said to be warm colors and usually have energizing properties. Greens and blues, on the other hand, are considered to be cool colors and are believed to have calming effects. There is some indication that certain colors actually have a healing effect on human illnesses and ailments, but this has yet to be substantiated by scientific evidence. Still, everyone has one or two colors that simply make them feel better, and there’s no reason not to include those colors in personalized home decor schemes. 

Choosing the Right Paint Colors

Choosing the right colors depends on how you want to feel in each given room. Bright and sunny shades of yellow, for instance, may help you feel wakeful and alert, and while they may be excellent choices for kitchens and breakfast nooks, they don’t work well in bedrooms and other parts of the home that needs a peaceful ambiance. 

Please reach out to us for more information on using color to create a beautiful living space.