As I was hanging up my new gray blazer yesterday and peering into a closet that's heavy on the gray, black and navy, I started thinking about colour preferences. I've always thought that all that stuff on the relationship between colour preference and personality was bunk -- you know, things like "people who like red are aggressive" or "people who like purple are artsy and sensitive". It's too specific. But you would think that there might be some correlation between general temperament and colour choices, where calm, reserved people would gravitate toward sombre colours, and talkative, extroverted people would gravitate toward brights. But judging by my own colour choices, that's clearly not the case. I'm not a sombre person at all. I'm cheerful and outgoing, and I talk a lot in an animated way. And yet the contents of my closet look like a rainy day in London. Sure, there's a few hot pink or kelly green outliers here and there, and I have a thing for red shoes, but overall there's a very restrained use of colour in my preferred palette. When I paint, it's the same thing. And the art and interior decor I prefer tends to use colour sparingly. It's not that I don't like bright colours -- I love them, but prefer to deploy them in a restrained way.

And I had this thought. While I'm definitely the extroverted type, I am very turned off by public displays of emotion, unless it's situation-appropriate, like say crying at a funeral. I'm embarrassed by drama. Even in private, I place a high value on composure and collected behaviour. In my family, while of course we sometimes argue, nobody shouts, ever. Perhaps too much colour is the visual equivalent of shouting? Does colour preference have more to do with behavioural preferences than personality? Or is it totally unrelated to either, and I'm just wandering off on a pointless mental exercise that makes no sense?