Wednesday, November 9, 2022 // The Statement — 4

Scientists estimate that humans can see 
about 18 decillion varieties of color. That’s 18 
followed by 33 zeros.
With a virtually infinite array of options to 
choose from, picking a favorite would seem 
like a time-consuming, maybe even unneces-
sary task. And yet, choosing a favorite color 
is a time-honored childhood tradition. In 
school, with family, in the media we consume 
— color preference is a staple of our earliest 
experiences and associations. Looking back, 
it seems random and unexciting. But a com-
mon question requires the development of a 
solid answer.
I tried pink. I tested out yellow. I dabbled 
in green and blue and maybe even orange if 
I was feeling quirky. But nothing really felt 
like my “right” answer until I started telling 
everyone that my favorite color was — and 
would always be — purple.
It’s been about 15 years since I made that 
declaration, and since then my grandma has 
concluded every text message with purple 
heart emojis. When my mom let me redeco-
rate my room in second grade, I insisted on 

a thin, cheaply made comforter from Over-
stock.com because it was the only one we 
found that had a purple background and a 
purple heart pattern.
My affinity with purple has seemed to 
carry over into my young adulthood. In 
almost every mundane purchase I make, I 
will always choose the purple option. If Ama-
zon tells me it’s going to take an extra four 
days for a lavender reusable water bottle to 
arrive, I’ll gladly wait. When I couldn’t find 
the right lilac-tinted photos for my freshman 
year dorm, I bought a paint set and made 
them myself.
Upon scrolling through TikTok, I even-
tually discovered that this color obsession, 
particularly with purple, was more common 
than I imagined. The original creator of the 
“purple girl” sound, Delanie Majors, has 
garnered over 360,000 likes on a video that 
guides users through her extensive collection 
of purple items.
“You know, some days I wake up and ask 
myself, ‘Has this third-grade purple obses-
sion gone too far?’” she says as she whips out 

everything from sleep masks to tennis skirts 
to dog leashes.
Since Majors posted this video in June, 53 
other TikTok users have taken the sound to 
show off their own purple habits. These vid-
eos helped me realize that intensity of color 
preference was not just an individual quirk 
but a psychological habit. When thinking 
about the way I’ve grown up and taken auton-
omy over how I choose to present myself, I 
realized that purple has become a pivotal 
part of my physical self-expression. My pre-
dominantly purple wardrobe does much 
more than bring me internal joy; it is my way 
of communicating the values I associate with 
the color. This is a somewhat common phe-
nomenon; my love of purple is anything but 
isolated. Perhaps it is simply a result of the 
way you and I think and function.
Color psychology is somewhat of an unan-
swered scientific question, though. There 
are some studies that provide moderately 
strong correlations between color and human 
response. But for the most part, sources that 
claim universal psychological meaning to 
colors are under researched and uncited. As 
scientists have been searching for decades for 

an answer to what colors mean to the human 
brain, it seems we’ve developed cultural 
meanings of our own.
For me, liking purple was the perfect way 
to subvert gender stereotypes while staying 
true to the femininity I identified with. It was 
the “other” of the constructed “girly” colors, 
allowing me to feel unique without alienat-
ing me from the piece of me who loved rose-
cheeked princesses and frilly pink dresses. 
In the social binary of gendered color iden-
tification (i.e., boys like blue, girls like pink), 
purple gave me somewhat of a way out. Even 
if I couldn’t process it in elementary school, 
purple made me feel like I could be more than 
my femininity. It made me feel like a whole 
person.
If you asked every person who made a Tik-
Tok showing off their purple possessions, 
chances are they’d all have different origin 
stories for their color preferences. This may 
be due to classical conditioning theory that 
tells us that associations between two stimuli 
are learned through experience and solidi-
fied unconsciously.

The purple 
personality

BY EMILY BLUMBERG, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Design by Emily Schwartz

Feeling kinda green: Reconciliation 
for our archetypal outcasts

BY NATE SHEEHAN, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

A wig of unknown origin still sits at my 
apartment’s kitchen table. Face paint bottles 
sprawl across the counter where two of my 
housemate’s habitually make coffee. Just 
moments ago, a hairbrush belonging to a 
friend of a friend from MSU was thrown in 
the trash. She left for East Lansing yester-
day morning. A sea of maize and blue with 
splotches of green had settled in over the city 
for the weekend. I witnessed a fight break 
out between the aesthetically complimentary 
colors on Maynard street. Halloweekend has 
come and gone. Another school year ritual 
checked off the list.
Many of the drunk classmates I encoun-
tered this weekend were quick to call MSU 
students dumb, though the school ranks 77 
across nearly 4000 degree-granting post-

secondary institutions. Perception is slip-
pery.
Take MSU’s mascot. On a historical level, 
common associations with these “Spartans” 
are of fierce, disciplined and “brutish” war-
riors that inspired fear in other Greek states, 
coming into ideological conflict with the 
“civilized” and democratic Athens. They 
supposedly never surrendered. But the real-
ity of these perceptions are much more com-
plicated than movies “300” or “Spartacus” 
might suggest.
Neither history’s nor Hollywood’s 
spartans resemble the Michigan State 
Spartan. For starters, none of these Spar-
tans donned green armor. 

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Design by 
Grace Fiblin

