Yellow is one of the colors I love most. [Quick story: I once brought home a cool industrial coffee table once. It was this great deep, distressed yellow with casters and a glass top (which was balanced precariously on top, I can admit it). Turns out my husband thought it was less cool than I did, because when he came home and saw it positioned in the living room he asked when our construction site was going to be done. Stinker! He was right though, and try as I might it just didn’t fit with the vibe of anything else we had. I was sucked in by that beautiful yellow.]

 

 

Yellow’s many associations:

 

amber, topaz, citrine

 

fire, direction: south. The solar plexus, the sense of sight, a circle or a triangle,

 

intellect, vitality, reason, cheer, and optimism.

 

In some cultures, yellow signifies royalty and has connections to gold and sun (think sun gods).

 

It can also signify change and transformation.

 

 

 

Yellow is connected to balance, to teachers or students (formal or informal), thought and concentration, being high-spirited and restless.

^^^^

These are prime reasons I resonate with yellow, though I’ve never known this until I started researching color meanings. Restlessness? Check. The curiosity required to be a student or a teacher, or the desire to learn new things? Check. Balance? Not so much, but it’s something that has a push-pull attraction for me. Yellow is also associated with joy, a sense of playfulness, hope, and being outgoing. Those sound lovely, don’t they? And finally, for Carl Jung it signified intuition, something that for me tends to inform the way I interact with the world around me.

 

Yellow might be my favorite.

 

It’s interesting to find out how other cultures view colors or how their language for colors came about. Here’s a video that summarizes some of the ideas in the book by Guy Deutscher about color and language. (I mentioned this book in another post you can read here.)

 

 

 

I’ve gotten a lot of information and inspiration from a book that might raise some eyebrows. It’s called The Women’s Book of Healing by Diane Stein. Prepare your eyebrows. The subtitle is “Auras, Chakras, Laying on of Hands, Crystals, Gemstones, and Colors” (note she used an Oxford coma, just for a little more controversy). There was a time when I would have been afraid of this book or thought anyone reading it was wandering into dangerous territory. However, while I don’t endorse all the material in the book, I do think there are mysterious things in the world, things we can’t explain, and things that intuitively make sense. Rather than run away from things that aren’t explained by logic or measurable metrics, I think we can examine them and take from them what is worthwhile.

 

Next week is the finally installment of our Color Meanings series, and it feels right to go across the color wheel and close things out with violet or purple, which is yellow’s direct complement. Hope to see you back here next week!