The Colours Blue and Indigo

As above, so below. The colour of sea and sky, blue is deep, cool and calming. The second most emotionally powerful colour after red, blue is its counterpart, soothing and relaxing rather than energising and intimidating. Like both sky and sea, blue is frequently distant, mysterious and evocative, provoking contemplation, meditation, thought and tranquillity. All over the world, blue is associated with understanding, protection, safety, and peace, and it is considered the ‘safest’ colour for use globally, from a marketing perspective. It can help promote restful sleep, spiritual awareness and even, supposedly, intuitive powers.

Because of its associations, blue is often felt to convey an air of seriousness, importance and authority, particularly in its deeper shades. As such, it is frequently used by police forces, who traditionally wish to convey both power and safety to the public they watch over. It is also popular in the commercial world, where it is seen as conveying a calm, stable, authoritative air. Richer tones emphasise the colour’s protective nature, and are more common in religious and medical settings, or on signs that are designed to provide safety-related advice. Light shades of blue tend to focus on more sociable aspects of the colour, such as confidence, integrity, truth, independence, loyalty and unity.

On a more negative note, as red represents the excesses of energetic emotion, so blue represents the excesses of calm emotion. It is frequently considered synonymous with depression – as in ‘feeling blue’, or having the ‘blues’ – and can also represent withdrawal, isolation, loneliness and instability, even insanity. Lighter blues can be very cold, both physically and emotionally, while darker blues tend towards the obsessive; deep blue is said to be the colour of fanaticism. Blue also carries associations to injury, from the colour of bruises, and to vice – blue movies, for example – perhaps acquired from the colour’s instabilities.

Blue Mosaic by MidiMacMan

Nevertheless, blue is a very popular colour politically and with authorities of all kinds, particularly those that represent stability and conservatism. It carries connotations of nobility, quality and reliability that salespeople of all types have been quick to latch on to. Historically, a lot of cultures world-wide have not distinguished blue from green, and the colour was not used in artistic works until the time of dynastic Egypt. Whilst this may have represented a global difficulty in acquiring blue pigments, it has also been suggested that the eye’s ability to easily distinguish blue tones from greens and violets of a similar intensity may be a relatively recent development.

Possible reinforcement for this theory lies in the fact that the eye finds it particularly difficult to pick out the colour indigo – some people are still unable to truly distinguish it from the blue and violet that surround it. Indigo was named and defined by Sir Isaac Newton during his definition of the seven visible colours of the spectrum. It has been suggested however – including by famous author and scientist Isaac Asimov – that Newton picked indigo out specifically to bring the number of colours up to seven, and that it should just be considered a shade of blue. Computer screens and (most) printing presses are unable to actually render indigo, which is best seen at dusk on a clear night. Symbolically, the colour is associated with psychic powers.