My Favorite Color

Jean-Paul Fargier

Saying that my favorite color is blue and asking myself why can lead to an avalanche of answers as wide as the spectrum. A girl named Rosa, infatuated with rose, gets talked into trying blue. Troubled by this reversal, she starts looking for explanations and asks specialists about how we perceive colors. A biologist traces the color blue for her in molecules from one species to another, from microscopic algae to pink flamingos, to shrimp: the most fertile male shrimp are the most colorful, and females select the brightest colored partners to mate with. Color vision is very objectively oriented, says the physicist, it’s not the eye that decides, but the brain. In addition to rainbows, which have not always had the same number of colors depending on the century, a rainbow specialist knows a lot about the influence of color on food and how industrial taste developers manipulate this base. A fashion historian reveals the secret of chameleon fabric. A color therapist demonstrates how to provide relief and even heal by the selective application of one color or another. And we have millions of expressions for each color; be careful, don’t mix up the infinite nuance of shades, call in a lexicologist!