Colours and Taste

Regular readers of The Space Doctors will already be aware of the weird fact that the colours we surround ourselves with or look at while we’re eating affect how much we eat. for instance, we’ve previously reported here on how what you see influences what you eat in unexpected ways.

Now Spence and Levitan share that “For centuries, if not millennia, people have associated the basic tastes (e.g., sweet, bitter, salty, and sour) with specific colours.

. . . Spence et al. (2015) concluded that pink and red were most strongly associated with sweetness, yellow and green with sour, white and blue with salty, and browny/black and purple (or possibly green) with bitter.

The colours associated with the taste of umami have been less intensively investigated thus far and, what is more, haven’t yet led to especially consistent results.”

Charles Spence and Carmel Levitan.  2021. “Explaining Crossmodal Correspondences Between Colours and Tastes.”  i-Perception, vol. 12, no. 3, https://doi.org/10.1177/20416695211018223