I am not a fan of colour trends. What I mean by that is that I think sometimes there is an urge to generate new colour schemes twice a year which feels a little forced to me. And it is one of the reasons why we over consumer. This is particularly the case with clothes where – in the UK in particular – we buy clothes far too often. Our consumption of textiles is generally not sustainable.
But that said, I am not saying that there is no such thing as colour trends. Certain colours – and colour combinations – become desirable at certain times and I don’t think the whole thing is artificially generated. I just think the changes are not as rapid as the colour forecasting industry would have us believe.
But I am old enough to remember the 70s and I remember well the desirability of brown and olive green bathroom suites, for example. Nobody would use these colours as the basis of their interior design colour schemes today — would they?
Well, today I read that brown is replacing dark blue as a favoured colour for interiors when a moody dramatic look is the aim. The article in Livingetc suggests that the use of brown – a more muted colour – is more natural in its feel and that sales of brown-hued paint are rising. There are some interesting examples of the use of brown in the online article.
On Dec 14th 2013 I posted about how the colour of your urine says something about your health (spoiler alert: the lighter it is the better!). Just over three years later I posted something similar, this time about the colour of poop. Let’s just say that you don’t want black.
Perhaps it is the time of year but today I read an article about why poop is brown. However, this time it was in TheConversation. TheConversation is an incredibly good website. It was first produced in Australia in 2011 and is a non-profit media outlet. In the UK it is supported the UK government and a number of UK universities (including University of Leeds where I work) to generate journalistic content that people can trust – academic rigour with journalistic flair.
I have only published in TheConversation once. I was invited to write about the effect of light on colour. I am quite proud of the fact that my article is the fifth most read article of any produced from the University of Leeds. It has 190,225 reads which is approximately 190,220 more reads than most of my academic papers ever achieve. So it’s a great way to get stuff out and have an impact.
However, I was invited to submit the article and even then I went through quite a rigorous process where the editor who is assigned to your case asks for evidence for every claim you make. So it’s not easy to publish there. The upshot of all of this is that TheConversation can be trusted. One of the problems with the current world, imho, is that the freedom that the internet has given us – where anyone can put stuff out there and where the world is no longer controlled by a small number of publishers – needs to be balanced by the problem that anyone can put stuff out there. There is more nonsense written on the internet about colour than almost any other topic apart from, perhaps, COVID, vaccines and masks. I won’t comment about those topics because I know no more about them than you – possibly less. But if you want to read reliable information about anything, written in a clear and simple way by people who study that topic for a living, I cannot recommend TheConversation more highly.
However, back to the more important topic – colour of poop. The article is actually a response to a question that was received from a child in Maryland and is part of a series for children of all ages called Curious Kids.
The brown colour is produced by the bile pigment stercobilin – first isolated from faeces in 1932 – without which poop would probably be very pale, almost white. The presence of this particular pigment in water is sometimes used to detect faecal pollution levels in rivers. So now you know one more colorant; albeit a natural one.
There is a related article about poop and health on TheConversation if you are interested. To make the point about articles in TheConversation being written by people who know what they are writing about they note in their article:
Have you ever wondered what’s going on in your poop? Perhaps not. But this is precisely what we think about every day at the American Gut Project, the world’s largest microbiome citizen science effort, located at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
This is the colour that has been chosen for the new UK cigarette packs in order to make them as unappealing as possible. It is Pantone 448 C, also called “opaque couché, and has R=57, G = 50, B = 32 and was first used in Australia for the same purpose in 2012.
New regulations – from 20 May 2016 – will see all cigarette packaging in the same drab green colour.colour with other standardised features such as opening mechanism and font, and with 60 per cent of the casing covered by text and images showing how smoking affects your health. The decision was made in Parliament on 15 May last year.
They have also been told to get rid of any misleading information from cigarette packs, and have been prevented from using words such as ‘organic’, ‘natural’ or ‘lite’, which could lead consumers to believe there is a healthy smoking option.
Interesting article by Ian Johnston in The Independent today about consumer colour choices for second-hand cars in the UK. Bucking the recent preference for silver, black and whit, the top 10 list of colour schemes includes green, beige, yellow and gold – colours that we associate with the 70s.
According to a recent study eye colour plays a role in deciding how trustworthy others will think you are. Researchers simply asked a group of people to rate the trustworthiness of male and female faces. It was found that a majority of people found people with brown eyes to appear more trustworthy. This was true for both sexes but particularly so for men.
But it turns out that it is face shape that is more important and eye colour is a major factor because brown-eyed people tend to have certain facial characteristics. For the original story see here.
According to this article black and white is back in fashion this year. Hopefully one day soon brown and beige will be back and I will once more be a fashionable gent about town!
Rob Hull, a car researcher, has noticed that car manufacturers seem to be pushing brown as the next big car colour. He asks, is brown really the next big car colour? I can answer that very quickly – NO.
I sometimes think that people think I am a bit of a weirdo – well, a nerd at the very least. Why? Because I have a blog that’s just about colour. I have interests in all sorts of things. I love music (play drums in a band), play chess (I have about 60 games on the go at any one time on www.chess.com, and I am slightly obsessed with Haruki Murakami (his latest novel 1Q84 is just better than you can imagine). But the thing I blog about is colour. Not any one colour, or even any one aspect of colour, but anything about colour – I am interested in colour physics, chemistry, psychology, philosophy, design, marketing, branding etc.
But today I may found that someone who is a bit nerdy even by my standards because I just found a website called http://www.howtomakebrown.com/. This page is interested not only in one colour, but in how to make it. How to make brown paint, brown rice, brown sugar …. is it just me or is this really weird!!
A six hour lay-over in Chicago so no excuse not to make a few posts. The first interesting bit of news I just came across is a story in the BBC about a doctor who seems to have developed a laser technique to change eye colour.
Apparently 20 secs of laser treatment can remove the pigment in eyes so that brown eyes become blue. You can read more about the story here. Don’t try this at home though – they are still conducting safety tests and some experts think the treatment could lead to other health problems.
