I used to think color was just… color.
Then I spent three months in Chennai, living with a family who wouldn’t dream of wearing black to a wedding, and suddenly I was drowning in a sea of crimson saris and marigold garlands, everyone laughing when I showed up in navy blue like some kind of funeral crasher. Red means life there—vitality, fertility, the blood that pumps through auspicious moments—and I kept messing it up, honestly, because in my head red was stop signs and Valentine’s Day cards, nothing sacred. But here’s the thing: color doesn’t translate. It shapeshifts across borders, carrying entire cosmologies on its back, and what feels celebratory in Mumbai might read as mourning in Milan, or vice versa, depending on which century you’re asking about and who’s holding the dye pot.
Anthropologists have been tracking this stuff for decades, give or take, and the patterns are messy. White, for instance—in most Western contexts it’s purity, weddings, fresh starts. In China and parts of Korea? It’s the color of death, funerals, grieving. I’ve seen brides in Addis Ababa wrapped in brilliant white, and mourners in Beijing wearing the same shade, and the cognitive dissonance is real, you know?
When Purple Stopped Being Royal and Started Being… Complicated
Wait—maybe we should talk about purple first. Because purple has this wild history where it used to cost more than gold, literally, back when Phoenician dye-makers were crushing tens of thousands of sea snails to get one gram of Tyrian purple, and only emperors could wear it without risking execution. The color was power. Then synthetic dyes hit the market in the 1850s, and suddenly purple was everywhere, and the meaning just… deflated. Except it didn’t, not everywhere. In Thailand, purple’s still associated with mourning widows—specifically Saturday mourning, if you’re keeping track of the old weekday color system, which some people definately still are. In Brazil, during Carnaval, purple’s one of the signature colors of passion and mystery, layered into costumes that cost families their savings. So the same wavelength of light—roughly 380 to 450 nanometers—carries entirely different emotional freight depending on where you’re standing and what century your cultural memory is stuck in.
Turns out, I guess, that color symbolism isn’t hardwired. It’s learned, negotiated, fought over.
In Islamic tradition, green holds profound significance—it’s the Prophet’s color, paradise, renewal, the shade of oases in desert landscapes where water means survival. You’ll see it everywhere from mosque domes to national flags across the Middle East and North Africa. But in Western contexts, green got tangled up with envy (“green with jealousy”), inexperience (“greenhorn”), and more recently environmentalism, which is a whole different kind of reverence. The same hue, completely divergent narratives. I remember standing in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, surrounded by green calligraphy and tilework, feeling the weight of centuries of devotion, and then flying back to New York where green just meant “go” or “recycle your plastics.” The whiplash was exhausting.
Yellow’s Strange Journey from Imperial China to Caution Tape
Yellow’s another one that refuses to stay put. In Imperial China, yellow was reserved for the emperor—commoners caught wearing it could be executed, no joke—and it symbolized the center of the universe, the earth element, cosmic authority. Even today, there’s a residual sense of yellow as special in Chinese culture, though it’s gotten muddied by Western associations with cowardice (“yellow-bellied”) and hazard warnings. In Hinduism, yellow’s turmeric, sacred, the color smeared on deities and brides during pre-wedding rituals, warding off evil. In parts of Latin America, yellow flowers at a funeral mean death, but yellow walls in a home mean warmth. I’ve seen couples argue about paint swatches because one partner’s cultural wiring says “cheerful” and the other’s says “ominous,” and honestly, they’re both right and both wrong, because color doesn’t care about consensus.
Anyway, the point—if there is one—is that color operates as a language we barely notice we’re speaking. We inherit its grammar from ancestors who made meaning out of ochre and indigo and crushed beetles, and then we move across the world and realize our vocabulary doesn’t match anyone else’s, and the conversation gets awkward fast. Blue might be calm in California and deeply sad in Korea (where “blue” and sadness share linguistic roots), black might be chic in Paris and catastrophic in parts of India, and every shade in between carries histories we didn’t ask for but can’t escape.
It’s exhausting and kind of beautiful, I guess.
