Fear of Colors

What the clinical picture actually shows

Chromophobia, also written chromatophobia, is described as a persistent and irrational fear of or aversion to colours, and usually a conditioned response. Actual clinical phobias to colour are rare, though colours can elicit hormonal responses and psychological reactions.

Most people the label is applied to have an extreme aversion to one or two colours in particular, or react only to bright ones. A minority are described as fearing all colour. The reaction is the ordinary specific phobia reaction: difficulty breathing, heavy sweating, and in some cases a panic attack, with avoidance severe enough in some people to keep them at home and damage their relationships and their ability to work.

Specific phobia as a class is common, with roughly one in ten American adults and one in five teenagers meeting the description at some point. No figure of that kind exists for the colour version, partly because people keep it to themselves and partly because they do not recognise it as a condition.

Every colour has its own word

The vocabulary is unusually complete:

• erythrophobia, a fear of red
• xanthophobia, a fear of yellow
• leukophobia, a fear of white
• chrysophobia, a fear of orange or gold

The red fear is noted as possibly connected to a fear of blood, which is the one colour term with an obvious physical referent behind it.

Leukophobia often takes the form of a fixation on pale skin, with implausible assumptions attached, such as paleness necessarily indicating ill health or a ghost.

The literal sense of colorphobia would be an apprehension about the visual processing of colour, but that reading has been overtaken. The word has been used with a racial meaning by public figures including Frederick Douglass, which is the sense that survives.

The other chromophobia is an argument about taste

In his book Chromophobia, published in 2000, David Batchelor argues that Western culture has repeatedly treated colour as corrupting, foreign or superficial. Michael Taussig traces that cultural aversion back a thousand years, and Batchelor takes it further still, to Aristotle's privileging of line over colour.

That is not a phobia in the diagnostic sense and it is not presented as one. It is a claim about a preference held by a tradition, not by a person, and it is the reason the word turns up in gallery catalogues. Martha Fiennes used the title for a 2005 ensemble film about wealthy people detached from friendship, children, love and integrity, which premiered at Cannes.

How animals sort colours too

Colour aversion is not confined to people, and the animal work reads as a set of orientation mechanisms rather than fears. Hatchling loggerhead sea turtles avoid lights in the yellow part of the spectrum, which is thought to help them orient towards the ocean. The Mediterranean sand smelt, Atherina hepsetus, avoids red objects placed beside its tank while investigating objects of other colours. Geese have been conditioned to react adversely to foods of a particular colour, though the same reaction did not appear with coloured water.

The last detail is the interesting one. A conditioned colour aversion that transferred to food and not to water was tied to the thing rather than to the wavelength, which is roughly what a conditioned response in a person would be expected to do. Alfred Hitchcock built Marnie on exactly that premise, giving his title character an aversion to red caused by a childhood trauma and washing the screen red in close-up to show it.