How to 'do' blue
A colour with a complicated past, which means it can be tricky to use in the home, I explain why, and how to work it well!
Blue is routinely cited as the world’s most popular colour. No doubt this is because it conjures idyllic visions of cloudless summer skies and warm calm seas. It confers feelings of tranquillity and inner peace. As a result, many corporate logos and uniforms, professional to scholarly, tend to be rendered in crisply inoffensive mid-blues in order to prompt thoughts of dependability and promote loyalty in the ranks.
Likewise, did you know that blue is included in 53% of the world’s flags? Consider too popular idioms like ‘blue sky thinking’ meaning to think imaginatively and without constriction; to have ‘blue blood’ infers someone of aristocratic heritage; and ‘a bolt from the blue’ can certainly mean bad news but also a burst of inspiration. Then again blue movies tend to denote pornography, and blue was the colour of choice for a certain, shall we say invigorating, little pill for men. And how about the ‘blue fit’ connotations of explosive anger?
What too of its moody symbolism? If we want laconic soundtracks par excellence, think no further than one of the greatest jazz albums of all time, the quadruple platinum selling Kind of Blue recorded by Miles Davies in 1959. Or indeed The Blues themselves, the very manifestation of strife and melancholia in musical form!
Fun fact: the phrase, ‘to have the blues’ is assumed to originate from the 17th-century English expression “the blue devils” which described the fevered hallucinations experienced by an alcoholic in the midst of cold turkey. In fact, by the 1800s, to be ‘blue’ was slang for drunk, as is ‘blau sein’ today, in colloquial German.
But pivot again and in Greece it’s popularly believed that blue wards off the ‘evil eye’, in India it’s associated with Krishna, and in Catholic churches it is the default colour for clothing the Virgin Mary. Yet, in Korea, dark blue is the colour of mourning. And, present food on a blue plate and your appetite will wane, as blue suppresses the metabolism. So, how can it be that blue, widely acknowledged as such a popular colour, is also intrinsically symbolic of woe, inebriation, death, suppression and divine protection?