The Colour Code

by Paul Simpson

How many colours are there? In the West we see seven, but the Chinese see five, while the Pirah� tribe in the Amazon have no words for the spectrum. Colour isn't something we see; it's something we think.
In this popular culture miscellany, Paul Simpson takes eleven key colours and explores how they have shaped our evolution as a species, persuaded us in politics and culture and allowed us to express or oppress personal freedoms. His book investigates such issues as the shifting gender of pink, the poisonous potential of green, the decadence of yellow, the performance-diminishing impact of grey and the ways in which orange has shaped power in Europe.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, Fashion, Design, Science, History

352 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2021

Reviews

[Natthaphon]

เป็นหนังสือที่อ่านได้เพลิน ๆ มีการรวบรวม trivia ของแต่ละสี หลายประเด็นน่าสนใจและตอบโจทย์ความอยากรู้ของผู้อ่าน แต่ก็มีส่วนที่สั้น เนื้่อหาผิวเผินเกินไป ทำให้เกิดความสงสัยและไม่เชื่อในสิ่งที่ผู้เขียนเล่า ประเด็นสำคัญที่ได้จากหนังสือเล่มนี้คือ ที่มาการผลิตสีที่นำมาใช้ในงานศิลปะและอุตสาหกรรม ถ้าคาดหวังเนื้อหาเกี่ยวกับสีที่ลึกซึ้ง พูดถึงประวัติศาสตร์ วัฒนธรรม วิทยาศาสตร์ และจิตวิทยา หนังสือเล่มนี้ก็คงไม่ตอบโจทย์นัก แต่ถ้าคาดหวังเกร็ดความรู้ว่า “ทำไมสิ่งที่เราคุ้นเคยกันดีถึงใช้สีนั้น” หนังสือเล่มนี้ก็ตอบข้อสงสัยนั้นได้ดี

[April]

I love learning about color. The topic just thrills me! This book was mostly enjoyable, but some segments of information were boring to me. A little too much about color history incorporated into sports and politics caused my eyes to glaze over as I read. I did dog-ear enough sections that I found fascinating to make this a worthy enough resource to use in my art classroom, however!

[Fariha]

Fascinating - a reference book and a love letter to colour in all forms. I'm an optometrist and always found the study of colour and all its shades and specifically the categorisation of colour incredibly interesting. I'll never forget the day I found out Munsell's colour system - a numerical scale to categorise colour! Pantone, and it's codified version.. even Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, with its different categories to refer to colour and describe it... Since the very beginning, we as humans have always sought out a way to define colour, and also, to prescribe meaning to it. This book is a culmination of all those things.

Think of your favourite colour. Got it? Now why is it your favourite colour? Maybe a toy you grew up seeing, a particular advert, a type of sweet... wouldn't you like to know when that colour came into mainstream usage, media, advertisements? What that colour represents, what is connotes, what it means? That's what this book does. The chapters are organised into broader colours, and then throughout the chapter it gives a whistlestop tour of every significant event / product / usage of that colour in history, any significant artwork featuring it, any historical figure who was associated with that colour; it's a veritable treasure trove of information, and backed up with facts, figures and stats.

I'll leave you with a few favourite bits -

From the chapter "Seeing Red"

"Women in Red were much on the mind of whoever wrote the Book of Revelations, between 60 and 95CE. The elusive author probablt wasn't John the Evangelist, but they certainly believed that red stood for damnation. The Whore of Babylon is 'sitting upon a scarlet beast' 'arrayed in purple and scarlet' and drunk 'on the blood of saints' and 'the blood of the martyrs of Jesus'. In the West, scarlet has, at different times, been culturally synonymous with prostitution, Satanism and adultery - the offence for which Hawthorne's protagonist Hester Prynne is ordered to wear the scarlet letter 'A'...
Possibly due to the lack of a biblical precedent, there is, as yet, no colour to identify men of easy virtue. "

From the chapter Yellow Fevers we get a wealth of information ranging from studies that show that the further a country is from the equator the more likely the people from there are to associate the colour yellow with happiness, to Van Gogh, to the infamous Yellow Pages in the UK.

"Yellow is a colour capable of charming God" - Vincent Van Gogh

A must have for any well rounded library - a great coffee table book and also jus to have for reference. I have a whole shelf dedicated to the topic of colour so this was a wonderful addition to that.

[Claudia]

I just enjoy books on color trivia and this is another one. Divided by color - Seeing Red; Yellow Fevers; Into the Blue; House of Orange; Purple Reign; Sea of Green; Pink is for Boys; Brown in Town; The Black Stuff; The Grey Area; and The Whiteness of Being.

So many tidbits of information -
Why 'aristocrats' are called blue-blooded - in the 9th century, Spanish Castilians would show their pale skinned arms and the blue veins before going into battle with the Moors and later it was to show contrast with field workers who were tanned.
Why various soccer teams wear the jerseys or kits that they do and how they've changed over the decades.
The only street light in the world that has green on top instead of red - it's in Syracuse, New York, in the Tipperary Hill neighborhood settled by Irish immigrants who repeatedly broke the lens, having refused to have British red dominate and be atop the Irish green.
At one point, about 85% of the Ferraris on the road were a variety of red - there is no specific color named "Ferrari red". Nor is there a specific color called "British Racing Green' although 'shamrock' comes close.
Khaki was first worn in India when the British military was looking for a uniform that would make men 'invisible in the land of dust'. So white cotton fabric was rubbed with mud, coffee, tea, and curry powder before tailored into tunics and trousers.
The little black dress, the man in black, the black Jolly Roger flag.
Han purple which was mixed into the material that made the terracotta army but once they were excavated, it mostly faded as has the recipe.
And hundreds more.

It's a fun book to read. And can easily be set aside to be picked up at a later time without worrying about losing the plot or your place.

2022-008

[Phoebe]

An easy book to pick up and put down due to the structure of the book of chapters based on colours with mostly disjointed bits of trivia and facts relating to history and sports. Overall the chapters were fairly interesting and the book feels like a good coffee table book to flick through with images and random facts to dip in and out of.

[Fiona]

I enjoyed this book. I liked the facts. However, there was so much content covered that you only got highlights of information and the context changed quite quickly between different areas (sport, politics, art, etc) making it all feel a bit disjointed.

[La]

Прикольно систематизовано всілякі цікавинки і факти про різні кольори, мені, як людині, що все життя грає в щдк та різні квізи прикольно було згадувати усі ці факти та, звісно, дізнаватись нові. Ну і, оф корс, як дизайнерці та трошки художниці)

[Noemi Valics]

The first few chapters were a bit harder to go through as they had a lot of political information, but it got more interesting later on. A great read if you want to find out more about colours through different fields.

[F]

3.5
A very interesting book with each chapter dedicated to a colour, exploring historic and scientific facts about it. Even though it touches on most parts of the world, I found the content very Eurocentric.

[Kristine]

Factoids about colour. Easy to read. Highly likely there will be something in there to help you for a pub quiz.

[Nicole]

Read by dipping in and out with the colours. An array of various sayings and random tidbits for each colour across history to the present day.

[Xenia]

Набор фактов об основных цветах, исторических, лексических, культурных.
Читать легко, картинки красивые и

[danielle; ▵]

a quick read, which is often nice; I do love how close pigment is to chemistry and culture (everything stems from color)

[Dolly]

fun book filled with interesting facts about color and what it means to people. too many sports facts for my liking.

[Charle]

this is a book with fun facts about colours. some facts were not that fun tho. some interesting ones. others not so much.

[Alan Hughes]

A meander through colour with interesting and quirky historical facts.

[Vika Maximova]

рандомные истории про цвета - пигменты, философия, история
идеально для короткого чтения на ночь
(читала если что на русском, издает миф)

[Valerie]

Посредственность

[Jeneva Izorion]

สนุกก ภาพเยอะ อ่านเพลินมาก ๆ ยิ่งใครชอบศิลปะหรือ fact เล็ก ๆ น้อย ๆ ยิ่งแนะนำเลย ข้อมูลค่อนข้างใหม่ด้วย (มีปี 2021 ด้วย)

[Marlene Willinger]

I didn’t finish this book. It was different from what I expected and it makes me a little sad but it is what it is

[JD]

Alternatingly enlightening and frustratingly surface-level. The factoid structure means there’s no real narrative, and I imagine part of why it took me so long to finish.

[Moo]

quite disconnected and not in depth, not compellingly written compared to other non-fictions I've read 😖