Colours of the Year 2024
5 minute read
Peach Fuzz, Sweet Embrace, Nude in Nizza and Blue Nova, to name but a few, are all the Colour of the Year for 2024 depending on where you get your interiors’ fix.
And whilst the cynic in me (and you) might assume it’s simply a marketing tool to get people to buy more paint, I do believe that there is a real love of colour in the home that most people working for paint companies do actually want to share. Your wall colour isn’t going to solve any difficult issues you have in your life, but surrounding yourself with colours that make you feel good will always have a positive impact on how you feel at home.
Many studies involving the psychology of colour have shown that human beings are not only emotionally affected by colours, but physiologically as well.
With certain colours being known to increase or lower our heart rates, and others to increase or lower our metabolisms. Which suddenly makes the paint colours we put on our walls seem ultra important when it comes to how we feel at home.
So the offerings of various companies with their ‘COTY’s’ as they’re known (Colour Of The Year), is more an opportunity for us to question how our rooms are making us feel - and whether the colours within them are impacting our physical and mental well being - in either a negative or positive way. But rather than rushing out and re-painting our walls in the latest COTY, the point is more to consider our surrounding colours carefully, and think about how we can use colour to create a relaxing yet inspiring mood within our homes.
Because our homes are our safe havens after all.
And whilst the odd pop of bold, intense colour can be very useful to add energy to a space wherever that might be needed, it’s more often a calm balance of harmonious colours that feels most stable emotionally.
And harmonious doesn’t necessarily mean that all your colours need to seemlessly blend into one another. But more that the colours you choose work together to enhance one another, rather than fighting against each other.
Take for example the blue joinery and wall above combined with the burnt orange chair. Whilst blue and orange have very little in common, they do sit opposite each other on the magical colour wheel…which is why they’re known as complementary colours because they bring out the best in each other.
The blue works to tone down the intensity of the orange chair, whilst the chair brings warmth to the blue colour. So they sit effortlessly together.
The peachy room above may feel a little too nauseous for a lot of us, but a soft pale peach on your walls can make for a very adaptable backdrop in your home as it sits well with both blues and greens. So an olive green sofa for example would look beautiful against a soft, barely there peach wall. As would a grey blue sofa.
And if you imagine this room in a stark white, I’m sure you can see how that wouldn’t feel quite as inviting as the peach . Because shades of orange are known to feel friendly warm and genuine. Unlike pure white which is perceived as more cold and clinical.
And the key thing that all of these Colour of the Year paint shades do, is to ask us to question our go-to wall colours…and maybe try something new.
So if you’re looking at your walls wondering how they might be affecting you, what are the traits that colour psychology associates with certain hues?
Yellow: optimistic, hopeful and mentally stimulating.
Blue: calm, meditative and easy on the eye and mind.
Green: grounding, soothing and contemplative.
There you have it. Colour has been scientifically proven to have an effect on our body and our mind…and if that’s not a reason to think carefully about the paint shade you put on your walls, I don’t know what is. But, as with all things in life, colour is intensely personal, and my associations with yellow are likely to be completely different to yours.
So the moral of this story is to dig deep into how certain colours feel to you before you go anywhere near a paint chart. That way hopefully you’ll create a backdrop for your room that feels exactly the way you need it to - whatever your emotional requirements.