All about colors

In studying the story behind colors, journalist Caroline Buijs discovered that knowing more about color can enrich your world and encourage you to pay more attention to everything around you.

What is color, actually? Apart from being a natural phenomenon (see box below), colors are also connected to culture. You can, for example, divide color into two categories: warm and cool. We classify red and yellow as warm, and green and blue are cool. This classification hasn’t even been around that long, and only dates back to the 18th century. There are actually signs that blue was viewed as being the warmest of all colors during the Middle Ages.