Can Wrong Colours Make You Ill?
January 20, 2010 by Christine Scaman
…or, title option, do your clothes make others feel, um, unwell?
Women and men have told me that they buy clothing colour by feel. Both have asked me to remove a drape because they felt sick, one to the point of becoming faint.
Are they exaggerating? Too theatrical?
NO! It’s VERY real. Everybody senses colour, more than we see it. We may not all feel it to the degree of physical revulsion, but we all experience a mild discomfort in the presence of wrong colours. We don’t take the colour choices in our homes lightly for that reason.
Since most people go around in wrong colour, we’ve grown used to seeing it and compensating for the feeling. But why does it happen?
The short answer is “sensory mismatch”. It means that 2 of your senses are receiving information that your brain feels cannot make sense together. The result is nausea.
Motion sickness in a car means your eyes are seeing “movement” but your brain is getting information from your ear’s balance system and your limbs saying “not movement”. The 2 don’t jive. The brain decides you’ve been poisoned and you’re hallucinating, so it expels the toxin by vomiting. At least, it’s believed to have evolved that way.
To explain it with colours, we go back to the most fundamental principle of how Personal Colour Analysis (PCA) achieves skin perfection and ideal appearance.
Every colour, in you and outside you, answers to 3 characteristics only. How Light/Dark, how Warm/Cool, how Clear/Soft (ask me in a Comment if I can clarify those concepts). Every single shade in you, every single blue and red and purple in you, fits in EXACTLY the same place on those 3 scales. Fascinating in itself, I ponder this often.
PCA finds you a group of colours that also fit in EXACTLY the same positions on those 3 scales. Your Colour Analysis swatch book is simply an exploded diagram of your own precise colours. It’s far, far too complex to do this without a true 12 Season Colour Analysis, for clothes colours or makeup. Then, when you WEAR precisely the same colours that you already ARE, the colour energies are in absolute synchrony and it is strong.
With wrong colours, the sensory mismatch isn’t between your eyes and ears. It’s between your eyes and subconscious colour associations. Your eyes are seeing one set of colour wavelengths emanating from the body’s natural colours. There’s a whole other set of waves coming off the clothes. The signals are all jammed. It feels tiring to look at, and for some, nauseating.
Most people dress in such a skelter of colour that there is no signal at all. They don’t look ON. All the wrong colours together neutralize what colour potential exists.
Is my theory scientific fact? I don’t know. I didn’t read it anywhere. It just makes sense to me.
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6 Responses to “Can Wrong Colours Make You Ill?”
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Christine, it;s fascinating that you should point this out. and it’s interesting that there are many people who actually “feel” color to this extent. I think I’m one of those people lol. Looking at colors that don’t “jive” as you say, makes me really uncomfortable. for me, it either works or it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it’s unsettling. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve altered my hair color quite a few times. for me it needs to be on target. sometimes, it is actually hard to pin point exactly “what” it is that is not working about a color, it more often comes down to a gut feeling. I think that color can have an extremly powerful effect on our emotion. In the right colors, I just feel better overall and more settled.
[...] At 12B, one of my meta-colour excursions, wondering if your clothes can make you (and others) feel greenish about the gills? [...]
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Hi Christine,
I take it you’re talking about more than a feeling of dislike, or being uncomfortable around a colour, more actually feeling ill?
I actually feel physically sick around certain colours and always have since a child – deep “overcast” purples like a stormy sky colour and deep, very cool red-blues have that effect, also some very bright pinks. Sometimes in a room with one of those colours, when I’m with people and can’t get away, I’ve developed a spltting headache or a migraine and actually thrown up shortly afterwards (always in private!). I wonder if certainly colours are programmed by Nature to make us unsettled, warning signs of impending storms, etc, or to suggest illness or something. At Art College I saw similar reactions in students, so are we artistic people more acutely attuned/ sensitized to feel these reactions? Or am I just averse to strong, violently cool pinks because not in my colouring as a deep Autumn, so seemingly against the familar and safe and perceived as something alien. My friend who is a doctor says there is a medical name for it (but shes forgotten and would have to look it up!) and is a known factor in some people, often migraine sufferers, not always and often in epileptics too and is to do with overload of sensory information as you suggest, a fascinating topic!
Jelena and Trisha,
The spectrum of reactions runs from tension to nausea. I’ve had MEN sweating and jittery, and confused as to why. It is a DEEP psychological imprint.
Jelena, you recall how you could decide within 2 seconds or LESS if a drape worked…you could never have had time to look at it analytically, I think your reaction was very physical, and you trusted that. It took me about 35 PCAs to trust that feeling.
Trisha, I get the most visceral reactions from makeup artists and photographers. I think many people are like I was, feeling something but suppressing it because our world demands analytical data.
Women above all, with our huge resource of intuition, can be guided by these sensations. The reactions are all very real.
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I sent a ton of photos of myself to Lora Alexander to analyse. Many of the photos had yellowed with age and weren’t of much use except to show how light my hair was as a child. All the photos are stored on my computer and when I later attached them to an e-mail they appeared much darker and more warm or yellow. That is what she saw. This led Lora to decide that I was a Deep Autumn. I had been feeling very confident at this point that I was a Soft Summer. In shock, I grabbed my stack of color books and viewed all the deep/dark autumn palettes. I felt sick to my stomach and tears came to my eyes. I hate those colors. I went to work early ( at my cosmetic counter) and put on deep autumn makeup just to see what reaction I would get. Everyone thought I was tired or had been crying. I was VERY surprised by my physical reaction/nausea to a group of colors. I also have given up on determining season by photos. If I had mailed actual current photos in the snail mail she would have seen how mousy, medium, and neutral my coloring really is.
Your reaction happens often. Color really gets us where we live. But, you know, I see 2 things happen with equal frequency -
One is that you’re right. The colors are not yours. It’s all you can do to bring them close to you, let alone wear them.
The second is that you’re wrong. There’s just too much wrong advice, wrong habits, and wrong ruts for you to wade through with anything approaching objectivity. You have spent years looking at how your top matches your bottom, your hair looks with your top, your lipstick with your eyeshadow with your top …….. all but the one thing that clinches the whole deal : how the color looks with your skin. Mostly because we don’t know how, and second because we cannot look at ourselves easily.
Most women who are quite sensitive to color are about 1/3 through their PCA before they call it right each time and start to see their skin react.
Great comment. Also good testament to how important it is to neutralize all the variables because every single thing around affects the colour activity in your skin.
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