Colour me happy

One of my interests is colour, specifically I enjoy painting, paintings and the use of colour so I'm also interested in the ideas, emotions and things that we associate with colours. It's estimated that humans can detect between 1 million and 7 million colours (1). Being a gender related blog the obvious place to start is with pink for girls and blue for boys which is a recent trend and the subject of a book by Professor Jo Paoletti who gave an interview about it for BBC Radio 4


Here's a blog  from a mother with children of "each gender", describing her two children's preferences at 13 months and 11 months of age and her reactions to this. Was the baby girl reacting to a skirt or to the colour?
I'll never know because her link to the item is no longer valid but I wonder. The following blog by Morgan Leichter-Saxby covers the subject of "thorough and aggressive" gendering of products for adults and children and suggests that gendered toys and play clothes restrict children from being imaginative and inventive. I recall the happy time spent playing with a clothes horse, a blanket and cardboard boxes. The bigger the box the better. Morgan continues: 

"The thing is most children are, at some point, already preoccupied by gender.  It’s wildly important to them at different stages, as they work out how they fit into the world and how to define themselves within and against it.  All of the elements of their lives, what they wear and what they play with, now combine to give them a very specific sense of who they are and what they can be – while telling them that it’s more important how they look than what they’re doing.".

I can't claim that I'm deliberately being a rebel with the intention of thumbing my nose at convention by wearing cheerful bright blue socks with hedgehogs on I just do because I like them. Just colour me happy.



If colour and gender preferences theories interest you try the website http://www.colormatters.com/brain.html


( 1) http://www.colormatters.com/words.html