
She lives in Washington, where the days are often gray and dismal and the yellow makes her feel like she has bathed in sunlight, she said. Proving the soul-warming qualities of yellow, Eiseman has painted the main area of her own house the color. Blue, on the other hand, has low wavelengths, which explains why it is strewn across the sky. When it is out of the clouds, children are told to go play.Īlthough the sun is actually white, we perceive it as yellow or orange because these colors have higher wavelengths and are scattered less easily by Earth’s atmosphere, leaving them behind intensely for us to see. The sun wakes us up, keeps us warm and feeds our crops. “And invariably in the upper right hand corner or left hand corner will appear the ball of sun and often with the rays emanating out.” “Give any child a box of crayons and they reach for the yellow crayon,” said Eiseman. This stems from its association with a crucial player in our solar system – the sun. The first words that consistently come to mind when people see the color yellow are “sunshine”, “warmth”, “cheer”, “happiness” and sometimes even “playfulness”. Through her research, Eiseman has conducted various color word association studies on thousands of people over the last 30 years.

In fact, yellow mostly has the opposite effect on people, she argued. “Yellow was not his favorite color and he did all he could to disparage the use of it, but that was strictly from a personal standpoint, and it’s taken on a life of its own,” Eiseman said. His name was Carleton Wagner, and he ran a school for people interested in color, she said.


“That’s absolutely not true,” said Leatrice Eiseman, color specialist and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, which helps companies decide which colors are best for their brands or products.Įisman knew the originator of that rumor, she said, adding that “he is now long dead.”
