Color Part 16: Color your Attitude

Day by day, in every way, become more and more colour-conscious. You’ll get better and better at it.

Switch over from your white notepaper to blue or pink or pale yellow. Experiment with various coloured inks. Or try to match the colour to the letter’s attitude or the effect your communication is intended to create. To appease a friend who left in a huff the previous evening, use blue notepaper. Write about planting more trees on green paper. Write an angry letter on yellow paper with red ink! Notes to the milkman may be in white, though! Pink letters to the mm is highly suspicious!

Wear colours to suit your mood. Or to suit the other party’s mood when you go to a meeting. Blue for peace, white for honesty, green and brown for neutrality, red for aggressiveness, black or purple for mystery. Mauve and Lilac for romantic mystery! Even the colour of your underwear is important! Reveals the real you! No, I don’t mean see-thru stuff, silly! Try it: you will feel a different person when you wear red underwear and another one when you wear white undies! If you wear pink frilly panties and are male, that's how you are in secret! It’s your biz, not mine, but mind it when you go to a public loo! Shake well after use.

Don’t dismiss colours as red, green, blue, yellow or whatever. Don’t just say, “Oh what pretty colours!” Notice the subtle differences and speak intelligently on colours. You may even name your own colours: desert yellow, wool pink, dung green or mother-in-law grey. You will be the colour pro of your neighbourhood and people will quote your colours! If you’re male, keep in touch with women’s fashion and the colours of lipstick, nail polish, hair and clothes. You’ll have an edge over colourless rivals.

Observe the colours of your body. Skin colour is a good indication of health or lack of, most times. Nail colour, too. Nails should be pinkish, with prominent cuticles, normally. When you’re ill, their colours change. Yellowish is unhealthy. White marks could indicate calcium defficiency or just that you didn’t wash the toothpaste off that morning. Nicotine stains mean that it’s high time you cut down on smoking.

Before you throw your junkmail brochures away, study the c combos. Why did the graphic designer put which colour where? You may also study the billboards when you wait for the traffic lights to go green. Till the car behind honks you out of your reverie!

Study all posters, ads, mags, books, websites you get to see. Why this hue and why not blue? Think like that, for starters. Any new colour combo you see, file mentally for future use.

Study the skin colours of people of various races. Notice how white skin appears pink in certain backgrounds and yellower in others? See how blacks are not blacks but dark browns? See how dark we are sitting next to whites in photographs and films? That’s contrast for you. There’s lots of variety in Indian skin if you notice, not just fair, dark or wheatish. ‘Wheatish’ complexion is Indian, matrimonial-ad jargon for medium fairness! There’s yellowish fair and reddish fair, please spot the six differences! When you study foreign skins, don’t do it too obviously. My friend who did that in a beach resort had some unpleasantness with the topless lady from London! Be very careful, folks!

To round it all off, let me say that colours work for you. And a colour savvy person paints better, designs better, decorates better, dresses better and thinks colourfully!