The amazing power of colour on children 🌈

Colours are like the vibes of the present moment. They enable us to express ourselves (subconsciously most of the time) and influence our moods.

We are all sensitive to their power. And it seems that children are even more so! That is what we want to find out with our TAO summer kids.

What colour do they associate with joy? And sadness? What does red mean to them subconsciously? Green? What’s it like to live life in blue? And in pink?

These are our summer experiments, carried out under the expert eyes of Jean-Gabriel Causse, an author and specialist on the influence of colour.

Place each kid in front of a box of felt-tip pens and give them 4 outline drawings.

The instructions? Imagine the colour(s) of the clothes of the child in the drawing.

On one drawing the child looks sad, on the other the child is afraid, on the third the child is relaxed and on the last the child is happy.

The results are were not long in coming.

The sad child was coloured in brown, black or grey.

On the other hand, the happy child wore a rainbow of lively colours, including green, yellow and a lot of pink.

The relaxed child swam is a sea of gentle colours.

As for the frightened child, there was a lot of red, like a signal of alarm.

When we choose colourful clothes, we subconsciously choose to wear joyfulness or happiness, and that necessarily has an impact on our emotions!

You, too, can test it with your children!

We offer you the 4 drawings : Imagine-de-quelles-couleurs-sont-les-vêtements-de-cet-enfant

And, if you like, you can leave a comment to tell us about the results 🙂

Following this experiment, we wanted to go further in our exploration of colour and we contacted Mahdy, a 12-year-old TAO kid that we met when he was 7.
At the time, we discovered synaesthesia thanks to him.
It is an incredible super-power that enables him to see life in colours like no other person.

We presented Mahdy to Jean Gabriel, our expert on the influence of colours and recorded their conversation.

You can listen to it on Curiose, the Tape à l’oeil podcast.

We learn that synaesthesia concerns 2% of the population, that the Inuit have around twenty words to define the white of snow, that a rainbow does not have 7 colours but 6 (good old Newton!) …

Mahdy shows his annoyance with the habit of reserving pink for girls even though it is an absolutely extraordinary colour for everybody! Jean Gabriel tells him about a study that was done on nursery school classrooms painted in pink. And he also teaches us that the colour blue was historically considered to be ‘the colour for girls’.

Mahdy wonders if there is a colour to prefer when he has a date with a girl or when there’s a dance competition…

And then together they review the colours of the rainbow, their impact and symbolism and give some interesting thoughts as to why teachers correct exam papers in red.

Their discussion was so fascinating that we recorded 3 episodes.

You can listen to it on all podcast platforms (Deezer, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, etc.) or by clicking HERE.