Follow the Yellow-Brick Road (A World of Color, Day Four)

Note: This is part 4 in a series of posts titled A World of Color. You can read the previous posts here: Introduction, Red, and Orange.



From the shimmer of Midas' golden touch to the pucker of the lips from a lemon's bite to the tapping of toes to the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, today's color is associated with things bright, cheerful, and appetizing.

Yellow is the sun. It is representative of happiness and energy, cheerfulness, and mental activity. When paired with purple, it speaks of royalty and Easter. Color therapists believe yellow can relieve depression, improve memory, energize, and stimulate the appetite.

Culture, of course, comes into play. Besides the obvious linkage of the color yellow to Asians, it can mean various things in various settings. In medieval times, yellow represented gallantry, but over time that meaning was lost in many places, and today, at least in the West, it is associated more with cowardice (one source said it is still connected to courage in Japanese culture). In Egypt, yellow is used for mourning, and it can be used to represent a dead person in a theater production in some places.

The Cherokees associated yellow with trouble and strife, while Apaches considered it one of their four sacred colors (representing the east, the originating point of the sun). And, of course, yellow helped direct Dorothy as she searched for the Emerald City in her ruby red shoes.



More guys in yellow...