You were born with a blueprint

A Few Colourful Thoughts About Colour

Why is a pineapple yellow? I'd wondered since I was a kid, but I only sat down and thought it through properly fairly recently.

Turns out the pineapple doesn't own a single drop of yellow. When light lands on it, the skin drinks up almost all of it. The one thin band it can't swallow gets thrown back, and that's the part that comes flying into your eye. So "yellow" is just the colour the pineapple refused — handed back, returned to sender. The yellow isn't in the fruit at all. It lives in the bounced-back light, and the final assembly happens somewhere inside your own head. Quite a thing, isn't it.

Stranger still is plain white daylight. It looks like no colour at all, when really it's every colour at once, bundled so tightly the seams don't show. A prism — or a single raindrop hanging in the air after a shower — does nothing but loosen the bundle. The rainbow doesn't travel in from somewhere far away. It was folded up inside ordinary light the whole time, waiting.

And here's the part I love: that same light isn't only in the business of showing you colours. Morning light quietly resets the clock inside you. On your skin, it starts the work that builds what your bones need. The energy a leaf once folded away and stored is still sleeping, by a long roundabout road, in the vegetables on tonight's table. When your mother tells you to get up early and go stand in the sun — well. She had her reasons.

Seeing, and staying alive. It seems they were one and the same thing to begin with.

Even a baby who can't say a single word yet already sorts colours into kinds. It draws its own line, all by itself, between the reds and the blues. The borders between colours are inside us before anyone teaches them — or so the research says.

And yet the moment you give a colour a name, you start seeing it differently. People who carry "blue" and "indigo" as two separate names tell the two apart faster than people who file them under one. There's a real reason to keep indigo standing on its own, a colour in its own right, instead of letting it dissolve back into blue.

By the way — in English, the word colour keeps turning up in odd places that have nothing to do with light. A colourful character. Colouring your judgment. Waiting for someone to show their true colours. Funny, that. None of it is about wavelengths, and still we read a person's true colours the way we'd read a fruit.

Maybe the old word-makers half-knew what they were up to. Colour is simply what a thing drinks in and what it hands back — which is to say, what it actually is. And if that's true, then of course a person has a colour too. You can hardly blame us for wanting to say it.

I'm no expert in any of this. But the day the framework handed three colours to each pattern, all sorts of small things started lining up in my head, and I haven't shaken the feeling since. How I'd been hunting for my lucky colours since I was small. How I loved a yellow pineapple. How I always took the pool and the sea over dry land, navy over plain blue — all sorts of little things, really. And somehow even a tiny discovery like this feels like someone carried a bit of luck over and shared it out with me. For which: thank you, deeply.