White falls from a sky the color of an opaque pearl, luminescent and heavy. Rooftops are white. Cars, blanketed and buried in white, sit forlorn on white roads lined with white trees in white yards of white houses. A man dressed entirely in white walks his black dog, an obsidian dot in the whistling tundra of arctic white near the Denver Country Club.
In the world of color theory, white is the color of new beginnings.
But in the flatlands of Colorado, where lingering snow piles date back to before Christmas, many of us are over our love affair with white. We were infatuated, maybe, after that first dusting of white. But snow now falls like tiny frozen teardrops. We are sick of new beginnings. White has become oppressive. A city under siege, we raise the white flag.
Considered the color of all things good – purity, clarity, optimism – white has a real dark side. Like the fairy-tale Snow Queen, it’s sterile, cold, unfriendly, elitist. Not to mention fatiguing.
“When the sun is out it’s almost blinding,” says Denver ophthalmologist Jason Jacobs. “We get a lot of eyestrain from that.”
White, the sum of all colors, is brilliant and blazing. Unlike black, which absorbs, white reflects. So we squint.
But is this excess of white calming us down, or getting under our skin?
The perfect amount of white is curative, say color therapists. White soothes and nurtures. It balances our body rhythms by stimulating serotonin, which regulates sleep and the nervous system.
But too much white light causes passivity, lethargy and hypersensitivity.
Robert Melvin, a University of Denver professor who grew up on a farm in the Northeast, knows the danger of too much white.
“In February, when you didn’t know there was a sun, everything was all white and gray,” he says, evoking a scene typically foreign to Coloradans. “The only solution was to keep working till you dropped, so you had no time to think. Otherwise you’d go crazy.”
Naturally, studies abound. And white doesn’t always come out the good guy.
One study considered how color affects workplace performance. It found that white environments caused workers to complain of headaches and nausea.
Another study of 6-year-olds studying in classrooms with white and blue walls found that the kids in white-walled rooms were 29 percent more distracted. The kids in blue-walled rooms had 9 percent lower blood pressure.
Some color experts, however, are skeptical of such studies.
“There are 350 shades of white,” says architectural color consultant James Martin, founder of The Color People in Denver. “Like blue-whites, green-whites, and pink-
whites. So when they say it’s a white room, is it a cold, harsh white or a warm white?”
Cultural interpretations, he observes, also skew results. In the West, white is the color of brides. In Eastern cultures, it is the color of death and mourning.
“In our culture, white is angels, pure-driven snow, godliness and cleanliness. Red and black are the colors of witchcraft and the devil. It’s a complete 180 degree turn. So Japanese kids in a white room versus English kids in a white room – imagine what the difference would be.”
White, really, is about context. Take it off the roads, and put it on the table.
White foods send editors at Saveur magazine into ecstasy. It’s “the most comforting color on the plate,” they write in the February 2007 issue, lavishing praise on milk, mashed potatoes, ricotta, rice, even white bread. Of course, they’re not recommending a diet of all mashed potatoes.
This month’s cover of “Yoga Journal” with its cover story about making a fresh start, bears a photo that conveys the utter serenity of white: a woman in a white sari, billowing in the wind of a white sand beach against a backdrop of white sky.
In advertising, white is eye-catching, excellent for
signage and packaging. Consider L’Oreal skincare commercials with Diane Keaton.
“The only thing that is not white is her lovely skin,” says Cathey Finlon, chairman of McClain Finlon Advertising, Inc. “So it makes her skin even better when white is enveloping her face.”
With white, it’s all about interruption. Think about a white-out, when everything – roads, houses, trees, buildings – is blanketed in white.
“It’s like nuclear winter,” says Finlon. “But if you interrupt white with green, yellow, or red, what does that say? Then white becomes about potential and about grace.”
Does white affect our perception of the world? Or do our perceptions affect how we see white?
“Every color takes on symbolic meaning,” says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. “White has all those pure and cleansing associations, but when the mind starts to attach it to cataclysmic events and weather patterns, we just want it to go away. So the meaning starts to change. We say, ‘Enough already.’ That’s when the negative creeps in, and overtakes the positive.”
But endless stretches of white on those fabled Caribbean beaches undoubtedly provoke neither headache nor nausea.
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com.
