Studies have shown that a majority of people like blue and consider it their favorite color. Given that there are millions of colors and billions of people, this is a very surprising statistic indeed. Blue is a beautiful color, no doubt, but so are green and red and yellow – in fact, every color has its own kind of beauty. Still people favor blue and there’s hardly anyone who actually dislikes blue. Why is that?
People who study these things say that perhaps this is because blue is the most common color out there. The vast and endless sky up above our heads is blue. So is the fathomless and shoreless ocean full of so many different shades of beautiful blue. Researchers say that because we see blue so much around us, we favor it above other colors.
But this does not make psychological sense. Liking a color is a matter of aesthetics, and one of the cardinal principles of aesthetics is that thou shalt not bore. Blue is everywhere, so it should have been a pretty boring color for the most of us. If so, we would never have liked it so much.
A more plausible explanation is that blue is the color of endless things. Blue is the color that is mixed up in things we usually consider infinite. The color blue represents the stark, untramelled infinite. Humans have always had a special weakness for the infinite around us. No wonder many people the world over consider blue as their favorite color.
