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