Colour Choice Advice

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30275, 30 October 1963, Page 2

Colour Choice Advice

[By

ITO ULRICH]

“Bright-coloured walls influence your disposition and can help lift your spirits. You should therefore bring more colour into your home!” This advice was recently given to West German housewives and houseowners at the Housewives’ Fair in Hanover.

The special exhibit “Gay colours better living” attempted to put discoveries made by colour psychologists into every-day practice. According to the West German colour psychologist Heinrich Enge, colours can give impulses or can quench a person's activity. The fundamental principles and rules of colour psychology were written on large blackboards at the fair exhibit The visitors learned that there are warm and cold colours. Red is considered warm, active and forceful. Yellow is also held to be warm but less active. Blue is

cool, passive, and fugitive. This is not grey theory but can be effectively demon-

strated on one’s own four walls. Housewives were shown several practical examples. “It has been proven that a cold room with little sunlight gets a warmer atmosphere when the walls are painted either yellow or orange,” Mr Enge said. “It has also been proven that blue rooms need to be heated six to eight degrees more in order to make a person feel comfortable in

them. It is thus possible to save on heating costs with the help of warm colours.”

Mood Influenced A person’s mood can also be influenced by colours to a degree. A grey machine in a grey workshop makes the worker feel tired and lowers his ability to concentrate. A pink or yellow kitchen makes the housewife feel happy and gay, and her housework is accomplished faster. Colour has long been considered to make work easier. But it has still to gain its fixed place in households. The head of the house should have red carpeting in his study as this colour has a stimulating influence on the nerves; Green has just the opposite influence and is better used to paint the walls of a doctor’s waiting room. It has been proven that people remain more patient when sitting in olive-green or brown waiting rooms than in a light-blue one. Boys and girls aged from three to nine prefer rooms with red floors and blue ceilings.

Extensive tests show that people change their tastes in colours as they grow older. Fifteen per cent of the tested five-year-olds prefer the colour blue. This increases to 45 per cent in 15-year-olds, 25 per cent of all five-year-olds stated that red was their favourite colour; this increases to 45 per cent in nine-year-olds and then decreases again.