The colours of envy

What studies find

Few studies have asked about envy. In the 2025 review by Jonauskaite and Mohr, green was the colour most often linked to envy or jealousy, but only in a minority of the studies that looked. The best cross-cultural test is a 1997 study led by Ralph Hupka in five countries. Germans linked envy with yellow, Americans with black, green and red, Russians with black, purple and yellow, and Poles with purple. That spread matches each language's own idioms. The fair reading is that people learn envy's colour from the phrases they grow up with. There is no good evidence that seeing green makes anyone envious.

In language

Shakespeare did most to fix the English habit. He wrote of 'green-eyed jealousy' in The Merchant of Venice and of the 'green-eyed monster' in Othello. French, Spanish and Italian also go green with envy. German has both 'grün vor Neid' and 'gelb vor Neid', green or yellow with envy, and Dutch speakers can be green and yellow at once. In Chinese the envious are 'red-eyed' (yanhong), and envy is jokingly called red-eye disease. Russian separates black envy, which wishes harm, from white envy, which is harmless admiration. In Hindi and Urdu the envious simply burn (jalna). No colour is needed.

Around the world

Many cultures treat envy less as a private feeling and more as a danger to the person envied. This is the belief in the evil eye: an envious look can harm a child, a harvest or a new house. The defences have their own colours. Around the eastern Mediterranean it is a blue glass eye. In India it is a black dot or a black thread. In North Africa and West Asia an open hand, the hamsa or khamsa, is hung by the door. The sickly green and yellow of European idiom probably comes from old medical ideas, in which an excess of bile was thought to turn a bitter person pale and sallow.

Where it is used

Storytellers in the English-speaking world use green for envy without explanation. Cartoon villains glow green, and in Pixar's Inside Out 2 the small character Envy is teal. Outside fiction the use is rare. Brands avoid suggesting envy, and green in shops and advertising now nearly always means nature, health or money. That is a useful reminder for designers working across languages. A green-faced figure will read as envious to an English speaker, as seasick to many others, and as nothing in particular to someone whose language burns with envy or reddens its eyes.

Envy in colour, place by place

Colours that carry envy

Sources and further reading

• Envy on Wikipedia
• Folger Shakespeare Library: Othello, Act 3, scene 3
• The Phrase Finder: Green-eyed monster
• Jonauskaite and Mohr, Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of research (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2025)