Fear of the Colour Purple

What the general condition covers

Chromophobia, also chromatophobia, is a persistent irrational fear of or aversion to colours, and it is usually a conditioned response. Actual clinical phobias of colour are rare, though colours do elicit hormonal responses and psychological reactions. Names exist for particular colours in the same pattern that produced the purple one:

• erythrophobia, red
• xanthophobia, yellow
• leukophobia, white

Fear of red may be associated with fear of blood, which is the only one of the set with an obvious route in.

The word does other work too. As a term of design and product criticism it means an aversion to using colour at all. In cell biology, chromophobic cells are a classification for cells that do not take up haematoxylin, which is related to chromatolysis and has nothing to do with fear.

Why colour has been suspect

David Batchelor's Chromophobia, published in 2000, argues that Western culture has repeatedly treated colour as corrupting, foreign or superficial. Michael Taussig traces the cultural aversion back a thousand years; Batchelor takes it further, to Aristotle privileging line over colour. That is a very long history for something with almost no clinical record, and it suggests the interesting version of this fear is aesthetic rather than psychiatric.

What the animal evidence shows

Colour aversion is easier to demonstrate outside humans. Hatchling loggerhead sea turtles avoid light in the yellow part of the spectrum, which is thought to help orient them toward the ocean. The Mediterranean sand smelt, Atherina hepsetus, will investigate objects of most colours placed beside its tank but avoids red ones. Geese have been conditioned to react badly to food of a particular colour, though the conditioning did not transfer to water of that colour.

Why the famous case is fictional

The title character in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie has an aversion to red caused by a childhood trauma, which Hitchcock stages expressionistically, washing red across a close-up of her face. It is the best-known depiction of the condition and it is a film.

What leukophobia turned into

Leukophobia is the member of the family with the most documented content, and most of it is not about the colour. It often takes the form of a fixation on pale skin, with implausible assumptions attached, such as paleness necessarily indicating illness or a ghost. In other cases it points at what white symbolises, as with people who associate it with chastity and fear or oppose chastity itself. In Paul Beatty's novel Slumberland the word means racism outright. Colorphobia has undergone the same drift: read etymologically it would mean apprehension about visual processing and perception, but its association with race is the sense that public figures including Frederick Douglass have used.