Tickled Pink
Or, How to Play With Color
I grew up in a house filled with books—my father was a Professor of Classics and my mother, now a novelist, was part of a weekly reading group called Dickens, in which they read works of Victorian literature aloud to each other. The vibe was academic and intellectual to the max. Being well read was the expectation. At eight years old, I expressed my anxiety to my mother about a possible, imagined adult indiscretion: “But what if I don’t like Dickens?” It seemed likely, in that horrible event, I would be cast out from the nest.
I did like books, even some of Dickens’, fortunately for my survival within the family unit, but of all the adult books in my bookish household, the one I remember poring over the most was the extremely 1980s guide, Color Me Beautiful, by Carole Jackson. Not exactly Proust. In this book, color theory was divided into seasonal palettes, and through a series of determinations and self-discoveries, women could learn to enhance their true color identity, whether Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter.
I found the idea of limiting my choice of colors to one quarter of the available menu strict, but the concept of exploring your relationship to color fascinated me. It still does. And the notion that colors can amplify our sense of who we are and make us feel more like ourselves is still a powerful one for me. Color is another way we can make ourselves feel more at home.
I’ve always had a visceral relationship to color, and combinations I find arresting work as a nervous system reset for me. This can happen in nature (the purple and green of lilac in season), art (an Agnes Martin painting), fashion (the knitwear of Hudson Valley based brand Eleven Six), and interiors (the genius color work of designer Rita Konig). I have a throw pillow on an upholstered antique rocker in my bedroom, and the blend of the colors of the fabrics soothes me on a soul level. The cream with a hint of pink in it, paired with a muted cornflower blue (an under-rated color I love so much) does something to my cells and well-being. I feel a humming contentment.
Color therapy or chromotherapy was popularized in the 1800s and is widely considered more mysticism and pseudoscience than treatment plan—but, there is no denying the huge effect that color can have on how one feels in a living space. In her book, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, Ingrid Fetell Lee explores the way our environment and in particular its color or lack thereof can profoundly alter our inner landscapes.
We’ve been living in the time of the neutral color palette, in the catalogues in our mailbox and the little boxes of our phones. In the time of the Tik Tok famous “sad beige mom.” In the time of greige. In the time of, Quiet Luxury, as Lena Dunham says, “oatmeal with bone with beige with tan.”
