Colour is the most amazing subject and I believe we know very little about how it affects us visually, emotionally and psychologically. I just know that it does. Haven’t you ever felt weighed down when wearing black, felt blue when dressed in navy or felt uplifted when you don something bright?

An online experiment has recently been undertaken by half a million people associating words to colours. The results formed part of a fascinating article in the Saturday Times magazine last week.

Obvious associations are diagnostic in nature - danger with red for example (think of traffic lights and other warning signs). Others are physiological. Humans have three colour receptors, red, green and blue while other animals only have two, so we could easily distinguish ripe fruit in trees back in the days when that was our main food source. What was a surprise was how perception differed according to your native language. Russians, for instance, have two totally separate categories for light blue and are more adept at distinguishing different shades of blue, not because they are highly perceptive, but because of their mother!