1st August ’17: It’s ‘pink’…or is it?…

Happy Tuesday, Colour Filers ❤️🍊⭐️🌵🦋👾☂️

As a lover of all things colourful, visiting an art shop is a little bit like returning to the mother ship. No matter that I don’t know my acrylics from my gouache (my artistic skills are, I confess, pretty rudimentary), I’m happy to just stand there, drinking in the visual magnificence of it all. My second-in-command came with me yesterday to choose some supplies while I read out paint labels like a child who’s just learned to read (“Oh look! Rose madder! I LOVE that name!”).”You’re not going to do that for EVERY colour…are you?…” he asked. “No!” I said. (“Yes!” I thought). It got me thinking of a study I once read that said women use more elaborate colour names than men. Where men said ‘pink’ to describe a cluster of colours, women differentiated between carnation, strawberry, bubblegum, magenta and salmon. And this happened for every colour. It is thought this is down to wiring differences in the visual areas of men and women’s brains (regardless of the extent of their colour vocabulary). Fascinating. No wonder my enthusiasm for rose madder was met with bewilderment. Have a great day and I’ll see you later.

Martha, The Colour File x

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