Why do we love certain shades while others actively assault our senses? Classical design theories love to repeat that everything is a matter of education or culture. Yet, by analyzing everything through the lens of our social conditioning, we overlook a rawer, almost primal reality.
What if our most intimate aesthetic preferences were nothing but the echoes of survival instincts engraved in our genome for millennia?
To understand this phenomenon, researchers turn to evolutionary psychology. This scientific discipline attempts to explain our current behaviors, emotions, and preferences through the history of human evolution. Its premise is simple: our brain is not a blank slate at birth. It is an organ sculpted by millions of years of natural selection. We live in the modern world with the brain of a Stone Age Homo sapiens, and our reactions to color are, first and foremost, survival mechanisms inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Every time we create or observe a color palette, a silent battle plays out within us: that of our primitive biology against our need for modern, sophisticated nuances.
To understand the impact of evolution on our perception, one must look at the work of researcher Anya Hurlbert. A professor of visual neuroscience and research director at Newcastle University, Anya Hurlbert has an unconventional background at the intersection of physics (graduating from Princeton), medicine (Harvard), and neuroscience (MIT). Her work focuses on how the human brain processes light and manages to stabilize its perception of color despite changes in ambient lighting (a phenomenon known as “color constancy”).
She became particularly well-known to the general public by co-leading major studies on color preferences in relation to gender and evolution. Her research suggests that our attraction to certain wavelengths—such as the almost universal preference for azure or, among women in certain cohorts, for shades leaning toward red-violet—could be linked to the division of labor among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, notably for spotting ripe fruit or clean water sources.
The call of red: awakening our “primal” self
In the practice of design or object creation, red holds a status of its own. Many of us refuse to wear it, deeming it too theatrical or suffocating for everyday life. Yet, we cannot deny its magnetic efficiency when it comes to capturing attention on a communication medium or a handcrafted piece of jewelry.
Through the lens of evolutionary psychology, this paradox becomes clear. Red is the color of the amygdala, the brain region that manages our most archaic emotions. Before being an aesthetic color, red is a biological emergency signal: it is the color of spilled blood, immediate danger, but also of flesh, ripe fruit, and sexual display.
Red awakens what is most primal in us: our nature as inherently sexual beings capable of violence. Whether we choose to wear it or not, red forces us to react because it makes our rawest survival instinct vibrate.
The infinite blue: between original geography and the quest for the absolute
While red agitates us, blue holds us back. Cognitive neuroscience research confirms that blue is the favorite color on a global scale. For evolutionary science, this attraction is a direct heritage of searching for clean drinking water and clear skies—synonymous with safety and survival for our ancestors.
Yet, artistic creation often demands going beyond this initial reflex. Our attraction can turn to a singular, almost paradoxical blue: an ancient, half-tone blue, distant from bright skies or saturated tropical seas. An aged, deep blue that seems to belong to no immediate landscape.
This is where the human spirit breaks free from simple survival reflexes. This timeless blue does not reassure us because it signals an immediate physical resource; it touches us because it evokes the vastness and the infinity of the celestial void. While we accept the beauty of natural gradients of sky or water, our sensitivity as designers often seeks a more complex shade—a blue that is not a simple replica of nature, but an invitation to contemplation.
The rejection of pure black and white: refusing the biological shortcut
One of the most valued contrasts in Western minimalism is the strict pairing of black and white. Yet, to a sensitive eye, this confrontation without transition can be experienced as a true visual assault.
The biology of our vision partly explains this discomfort. Our retinal cells fatigue when faced with contrasts that are too violent, which create visual irradiation phenomena. But beyond physiology, it is our relationship with the living world that expresses itself in this rejection.
Pure black and white is a shortcut. It imposes extremes where nature offers only transitions, soft shadows, and infinite gradients. To refuse the violence of this graphic contrast is to remember an essential truth that our primitive brain sometimes tends to forget in an emergency: life does not boil down to binary choices. Life is nuance.
An invitation to diverge
By observing our reactions to colors, we realize that we are not merely passive receivers of a cultural code. We are inhabited by a fascinating tension.
On one hand, our evolutionary heritage pushes us toward reflex reactions: we are programmed to be stimulated by red and calmed by blue. On the other hand, our consciousness as thinking beings seeks to complexify these signals, to introduce nuance where nature is abrupt, and to invent novel harmonies to express our inner world.
The next time you choose a color, ask yourself: is it your culture speaking, your civilized need for nuance, or the distant voice of an ancestor still watching over you?