Here’s an email I received from Morticia (these are her exact words):
An interesting site but you are incorrect about one thing. You suggest that the brain cannot retain a colour, hue, tone, tint, etc. As an artist and textiles designer, I frequently carry colours in my mind, buy fabric, thread, etc. and it matches exactly when I get home. Maybe I am unusual but I can’t be the only one. I sort of consider myself to have perfect ‘pitch’ with colour in the way that musicians can have perfect pitch. I have also noticed that artistic people with a good sense of colour would never need to ‘be draped’.
Morticia
Dear Morticia,
I’ll answer each of your 5 points separately.
1. Colour analysis is not just for people who can’t retain colour in their brain
Colour analysis is so much more than that.
Draping people is just a tiny part of what a colour consultant does… well, at least for a consultant who puts the client first, of course, not these stuck-in the-dark-ages consultants who don’t feel they’re ‘doing it’ unless they’re brandishing a dratted drape in their hands.
Colour and style consultancy is not about teaching people to retain colours in the brain or even about the colours themselves.
Colour and style is all about giving people confidence and with some clients we might never even get a colour drape out!
Our business is about showing our clients how utterly fabulous they can look and FEEL which has absolutely nothing to do with how many colours their brain can retain or not.
2. Why people consult a colour consultant
Whether you can retain colour in your brain or not, you can never be totally objective about yourself – and that’s exactly why people consult a colour consultant.
What you see in the mirror is never what the rest of us see:
- That spot on the end of your nose is at least 15 inches wide to you while the rest of us would never have noticed it until you pointed it out!
- That bright pink eyeshadow that you think makes you look absolutely gorgeous makes the rest of us wonder which son of a so’n’so smacked you in the eye this morning
- Those dark bags under your eyes that make you cringe when you look at your reflection in the mirror don’t even register for the rest of as we are just blown away by how beautiful your smile is
Be aware that image consultants can never be objective about themselves either. We all need to check what we see in the mirror and compare it with what others see, or we run the risk of becoming pompous and arrogant about our own view of our abilities!
3. Most people can’t remember specific colours
Morticia, you say that you can remember specific colours but there’s plenty of professional research available which shows that most people can’t:
- Professor Mark Fairchild is Director of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His research shows that when asked to pick out the colour of a red stop traffic light from a selection, the majority of people couldn’t accurately identify the actual colour. Professor Fairchild notes, “We can remember only general categories of color represented by significant color names. That’s why there are so many sophisticated ways to name, organize, and measure color.”
- Another survey done by a US university shows that only 4 colours can be retained at one time, much like the nose can only tell the difference between 4 – 6 fragrances before it ‘conks out’ (sorry – just couldn’t help myself!). This survey concluded, “The nose quickly adjusts to a new scent, sends a message to receptors and then, so to speak, clears itself out, desensitizes itself to the scent which it had just detected, to be ready for the next scent. The brain does much the same with colors.”
And if the majority of people could remember exactly what tone, tint, shade, or hue of colour their sofa / carpet / wallpaper actually was, then surely they would be able to buy paint to match it exactly down at the DIY store without any help at all.
So then, why do paint manufacturers invest millions of dollars every new season in producing shade charts and colour chips for their potential customers to take home to check first?
Could it be that most people can’t retain different shades, hues, tones, or tints of colour in their brain?
4. We all retain what we learn in different ways
We all use our brains in different ways and for different things, and we all retain what we learn – or not – in different ways and at different levels.
If you’re primarily a visual learner, then it’s probably easier for you to visualise a colour.
- I am not a visual learner at all so it’s hardly any wonder that I don’t retain colour in my brain
- I have worked with colour on a daily basis now for 40+ years and I don’t retain the different nuances of colour at all
- It’s probably got a lot to do with what we choose to remember… I don’t need to remember specific colours because I have colour swatches to do that for me
- This allows me to invest my time and energy into remembering things which are more important to me
- Thank goodness we’re all different!
Intriguingly, and as mentioned briefly in #3 above, there’s a huge amount of research on how we ‘remember’ colour.
One of these is to give a name to a colour to help you remember. So the question then becomes, “Do we remember the colour itself or is it the name itself that we’ve attributed to that colour to help us remember it?”
The following is taken from ‘Whorf and His Critics: Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Influences on Color Memory by JA Lucy & RA Shweder (published in American Anthropologist (Sep 1979)):
“Delayed recognition of color stimuli is related to ‘communication accuracy’. The process of delayed recognition is defined as: When the color initially appears you try to give it a distinctive name…When the color is removed the name can be retained, even rehearsed.Somehow, names are responsive to volition in a way that images are not…When the (color) chip is found which best serves the name, that is recognition.”
Depending on whether your learning style is visual, auditory or kinaesthetic (or any combination thereof), there are billions of unique individuals on this planet who ‘see’, ‘hear’, or ‘feel’ colours – or not – in a multitude of different ways.
Whether you actually retain the information that you’ve just learned depends on a combination of so many other factors:
- how interested in the subject you are – or not
- what kind of task is involved – detail-oriented or creative?
- how tired or alert you are
- what your primary learning style is
- unconscious motivations that influence your cognition and behaviour through learned associations
- conscious motivations about which you make a definite choice – do you need to retain colours in your brain, or do you even want to?
We all learn in different ways, we all retain learned knowledge in different ways, and some of us choose NOT to retain what we’ve learned at all!
5. Plenty of artistic people choose to have their colours analysed
As for your observation, “I have also noticed that artistic people with a good sense of colour would never need to ‘be draped’”, a plethora of artistic people with an excellent sense of colour clearly disagree with you.
Over the last 40+ years, I have ‘draped’ a plethora of artists, fashion designers, graphic artists, hat designers, jewellery designers, hair colourists, make-up artists, fashion stylists, and lots of extremely experienced image consultants too.
I also have one regular client who has been coming back to me for help with her own colour, style, and image over the last 20 years or so and she is a professor of art and design at a prestigious university!
I have also diagnosed chemists, doctors, and even a Ph.D cancer research specialist!
Quite a few of these highly-qualified professionals have since gone on to train in image and colour.
They have experienced the enormous benefits of colour analysis for themselves and now want to be able to offer the same great experience to others and / or to use the concepts of colour more intelligently in their own work.
Clearly there are plenty of artistic people who want to experience colour analysis for themselves.
That’s because colour analysis is never about the science (because there isn’t one).
Consulting a colour analyst, personal stylist, or image consultant is all about learning how to look and feel fabulous.
Looking and feeling better than others will get you what you want because how you dress tells other people how to treat you
In conclustion, Morticia…
