What is your favourite colour?
Dorothy Searle celebrates the beauty of diversity
Most of us have been asked this question at some time, but does it have an answer? Can you think about a whole colour at once? Don’t you have to fix on a particular shade? If I prefer cornflower blue to emerald green, does that mean that I always like blue better than green? Perception of colour has a lot to do with culture and language, and words change their meaning over time. The colour ‘pink’ is named after the flower, not the other way round. The name of the flower reflects the serrated edges of the petals. Originally, the colour we now call ‘pink’ was called ‘rose’ (and still is in French) but how many different shades of pink are there in roses? The question is so lacking in precision as to make it meaningless.
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