Diet and the Color Of Your Kitchen
Posted on May 8, 2008 - Filed Under Kitchen Color, Kitchen Design |
How the color of your kitchen could affect what and how much you eat. Discover what color to paint your kitchen and what colors to avoid.
Color plays an important role in our lives everyday. Color is a constant; are world is surrounded by varying shades, tints and depths of hues. But can color sway our thinking, change our actions or cause expected reactions?
Yes it does. It can irritate or soothe our eyes, raise blood pressure or suppress our appetite.
Joseph Albers once said in Lois Swirnoff’s book ‘Dimensional Color’: “No color is perceived as what it actually is physically. Without special devices we never see color singly, or by itself, as we may hear single tones, but only in relationship to the many factors, which influence our vision, which transfer the optical (physiological) susceptibility into a psychological effect (perception).”
A study was recently done with the three primary colors: red, yellow and blue, to see how they each affected the individual in three separate rooms saturated in their respective color. Each room was identical in height, size, furniture, food and beverage offering, and layout. The only difference in each room was color.
The first difference that was immediately noticed was that by a ratio of 2-to-1, twice as many people initially entered the yellow room as opposed to the blue room. However, it is fair to note that while they may have entered the yellow room first, they left more quickly while those in the blue room stayed much longer.
Red and yellow created dynamic environments of movement and social interaction, while blue created a space of calm and stillness with little social interaction. In the red and yellow rooms, the crowd tended to be louder and congregate more towards the center while in the blue room, individuals seemed to stay towards the edges of the room, speak in more muted tones and interact less. Those in the red and yellow room seemed to make the rounds where as in the blue rooms; individuals remained in the same place longer.
The initial hypothesis and often taught theory that red inspires people to eat more and causes time to stand still was not confirmed. In fact, the findings suggest that yellow, not red, stimulates the appetite. Individuals ate twice as much in the yellow room, but reported being ‘not hungry.’ Those in the red room reported being very hungry but did not eat as much as those in the yellow room.
What does all this scientific, color, mumbo-jumbo mean to you? Simply, that as you are creating your spaces, remember what their natural functions are and how the color on the wall and surrounding objects will subconsciously affect the people in them.
According to the findings in the study, you would not want to paint a kitchen a soothing and calm blue where you wanted to do a lot of dynamic entertaining.
If you were on a diet, however, you wouldn’t want to paint your kitchen red or yellow based colors. Red would make you twice as hungry and yellow would cause you and your family to consume twice as much.
It is no wonder that so many times the home owner, realtors and builders alike would want to stick with beige. In the end, all that really matters, though, is how the colors in your home make you and your family feel.
So choose the colors you like and enjoy. If you want to experiment with a new color, try a rug. Area rugs come in all the colors of the rainbow and you are sure to find the right one for you; from a bright green rug to a subtle pink area rug.
By choosing a brightly colored rug you can easily see if you like the color in your kitchen. It is an affordable way to instantly add color to your room.
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