Our images leap forth from more basic earth elements. This is true of everything that surrounds you right now. Find something colored in your environment—the black on your computer keys, the red in your lipstick, or the white in your notepad—that color is a relationship with a material, derived from a specifically sourced pigment. Perhaps the black is from Russian magnetite, mined from the world’s largest magnetic anomaly. Maybe the red is from ancient volcanic soil from the Persian Gulf in Iran. Perhaps the white is from ancient marine organisms compressed, heated, and uplifted into California marble. All of this is to say, there is a material supply chain for color. A deep, geomorphic time chain, as well as a continuous and sprawling human chain gang of mining and distribution projects. Color is not some design spec Pantone or Munsell swatch floating in vague digital space. Color is social, behavioral, messy, tangible stuff. No matter how abstracted, eventually our colored worlds harken back to very specific somewheres and several somebodies bludgeoning the rainbow. ...

∆ Heidi Gustafson

Before we can even name a hue, we have felt it as a sensory reality in our bodies. Blue and green affect us differently from red and yellow. As Kym Maclaren argues in an essay on embodied perception, 'That the stimuli of short duration produce an effect in in persons’ bodies before a colour is explicitly sensed, suggests that it is our sensitive-perceptual motor body, and not a knowing, thinking subject, that sense colours.' Colour acts in us.

∆ Siri Hustvedt, from The Drama of Perception: Living, Thinking, Looking

ref: _In 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a book on a pretty groundbreaking idea: Every culture in history invented words for colors in the exact same order.

They reached their conclusion based on a simple color identification test, where 20 respondents identified 330 colored chips by name. If a language had six words, they were always black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If it had four terms, they were always black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always black, white, and red, and so on.

The theory was revolutionary, and it shaped our understanding of how color terminologies emerge. But the idea comes with a few caveats, since all languages do not treat colors the same way grammatically as English does.

ref: The Himba tribe - Because of the ways in which their colours are categorised, it influences the way Himba’s perceive the colours/ The findings supported the claim that language can in fact affect the way in which you see colour._