Color psychology is the study of various colors, their shades and hues, and their effects on our behavior. Colors affect us physically, mentally, and emotionally. Within our homes, where we spend so much of our time, we would be foolish not to lean on color psychology to help with our decorating choices! Other than decluttering and organizing. Don’t you want your home to convey happiness and good cheer? Then you’ll want to use the colors that bring about feelings of happiness. These are the bright, warm colors, or pastel shades. To happiness and optimism, we need to think light and bright!
Yellow
Yellow is the cheeriest of the colors, making you feel energized, creative, and spontaneous. It’s the color of daffodils and sunshine, laughter and hope. Yellow accents in your home will help your family feel optimistic and cheerful – but beware! Yellow also reflects a large amount of light and can be irritating visually. It has even been scientifically proven to increase hunger, which is perhaps not something we want our house to do! To keep yellow from being overwhelming, keep it relegated to being the pop of color in a room. Think wall art, an armchair, a vase. You can also tone down the irritation of yellow while maintaining its benefits by lighting it to pastel shade, or going with a deeper, on-trend mustard color – just make sure that you’re still working with variants of a warm yellow, not a cool one!
Red
Red is the warmest of the warm colors, making you feel passionate and energized. But red in its brightest, most primary hue triggers strong opposites in emotion – it’s both the color of love and the color of anger. We use it to draw someone’s attention to something or warn them of danger. For this reason red, like yellow, is best kept to an accent color. Again, if happiness is the aim of your game, stick to warm-toned reds.
Orange
Orange is the happy medium between red and yellow. It draws your attention and energizes you like red, but it is also friendly and inviting like yellow. If red is the color of passion and yellow is the color of creativity, then orange is the color of enthusiasm, the melding of the idea, and the passion to see it through. While productivity, vitality, and enthusiasm might seem to be words for an office rather than a home, people feel happy when they feel productive, enthusiastic, and full of vim and vigor. Orange lightens into a beautiful peach, and peach is a great color for large spaces like walls or furniture sets.
Pink
While technically a shade of red, pink is almost a color of its own right in color psychology. Pink is the romantic side of red’s passion. Pink, like all pastel colors, is relaxing, soft, and gentle. It’s also associated with being inviting and sociable, which is definitely linked to happiness! Pink works great as both a large space color and an accent color. Adding a pink office chair will lend happiness to your home office. Bright pink flowers, real or fabric, will brighten and cheer any living space.
Green
Green is a great balancer in color psychology and can be used in just about every type of room and building. Again, we want to stick with warm tones of green to convey cozy happiness. Green is both physically calming and mentally energizing, which lends itself to a happy enthusiasm. The natural world is bursting with green. Depending on your surroundings, open those blinds wide to bring in that green! Put various house plants around the house to not only add various shades of green but also improve your indoor air quality!