Why Yellow and Blue are combined so often!

Yellow and Blue

 

Yellow and Blue, if we think about it for a moment, many things that have this combination will come to mind: Ikea, Sda, Lidl, Poste Italiane, Messina beer, Chiquita, Ryan Air, the flag of Ukraine, that of Finland, the inscription of the Pokémon... the list could go on and on and, no, it's not a coincidence. In this short post there is the story of why this chromatic combination is so central and "lucky".

To each character… its own Color

Before arriving at the Branding-logo of famous brands, let's start with the characters: often these are identified through a very precise color: the Prince Charming, Peter Pan, Little Red Riding Hood... This is nothing more than a way to be able to immediately convey the globality of the character, managing to transcend from a real and proper description.

Goethe and his "young Werther", the origin of everything

If we talk about Blue and Yellow, let's mention them right away Goethe, the author so decisive for all the theory of colors, is responsible for this fortunate and ever-present combination.

Goethe describes the young Werther in his novel "The pains of young Werther" dressed in a blue jacket and yellow waistcoat, both in the moment of the meeting with Charlotte, and in that of his suicide which he reaches precisely for the unrequited love with her.

The combination is not random because:

• YELLOW = Light
• BLUE= Shadow

Yellow and blue are the two opposite poles: light and shadow from which everything that exists springs.

Blue, Yellow and LOVE

For us girls who grew up born in the 80s and 90s, the costume of the young Werther will undoubtedly bring to mind the animated film "The beauty and the Beast" in which the latter is dressed in a blue tailcoat while Belle wears a sparkling yellow-gold dress.

The Disney animated film was released in 1991 and brought back the subject of the fairy tale by Beaumont, according to some this would be a variant of the myth of "Love and Psycheby Apuleius.

At a first reading, Belle's encounter with the Beast indicates the contrast between Passionate Love and Intellectual Love, the eternal dichotomy between Mind and Body, in which Belle's grace manages to transform even a gentleman a beast.

A BIGOT Moral

What will leave you speechless is the bigoted moral that hides behind this fairy tale as it served to provide the girls of the time with a justification for arranged marriages: dear damsels, even if you are given as brides to old men who seem to you beasts, in reality you will see then, that these are not!

We then take into account that all the fairy tale characters of the time are Bourgeois and of this social class they bring conflicts, the same ones that arise from yellow and blue which then end up creating a winning combination.

It is no coincidence that Belle shows up in a blue dress, blue is for the bourgeoisie not to wear gray, then the girl is dyed yellow and this color is luminous, rational, enlightening and civilizing.

Colors, as in this case, are not just something that is there to be more or less visible, but they are the construct of stories and considerations that perhaps thanks to the colors are able to transcend even historical periods.