Colour and emotion
The colours of fear
Fear is black in most studies, and pale in most languages: 'white as a sheet' in English, 'blue fear' in French and Italian.
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Fear has two colours. One is black, the colour of night and of what cannot be seen, and it is the answer people give most often in studies. The other is paleness. A frightened face loses its colour, and languages around the world describe fear as turning white, blue or yellow. Neither is a colour that causes fear. Black is linked to it through darkness, and pallor is simply what fear does to the skin of many people.
What studies find
In the 2025 review by Jonauskaite and Mohr, black was linked to fear in about two thirds of the studies that tested it. Grey came second, and purple appeared now and then. The evidence is steady but narrow: nearly all of it comes from asking people which colour goes with the word fear. The likely root is darkness. Fear of the dark is common in childhood across cultures, though that alone does not prove the link. The pale face is better understood. Charles Darwin described in 1872 how blood leaves the skin in terror, and later physiology agrees that blood is redirected away from the skin under threat.
In language
English speakers go 'white as a sheet'. Germans turn chalk-pale (kreidebleich), and in Chinese a face goes white with fright. French and Italian fear is blue: 'une peur bleue' and 'fifa blu', and English once had the 'blue funk'. Japanese uses aozameru, to turn pale blue, for a face drained by fear. In Hindi the colour 'flies from the face' (chehre ka rang ud jaana), or the face turns yellow. American English calls a coward 'yellow' or 'yellow-bellied'. Shakespeare's 'lily-livered' means the same: a pale liver, with no blood and so no courage.
Around the world
Ghosts show how local the colours of fear can be. In Europe and North America a ghost is a white sheet. In Japan the yurei wears the white kimono in which the dead were buried. The Natyashastra, India's classical treatise on drama, makes the mood of terror black. Many customs meet fear with colour. In India a black dot is put on a baby's cheek or forehead to turn away the evil eye. In Turkey and Greece a blue glass eye does the same job. Among the Gullah Geechee of the American South, porch ceilings were painted a pale 'haint blue' to keep restless spirits out.
Where it is used
Horror films work with darkness first: black frames, deep shadow and a little cold blue or sickly green. Blood red is used in small, sharp amounts. Halloween is orange and black. Safety design uses fear's cousin, alarm. Yellow and black stripes mark hazards, borrowing the warning pattern of wasps, and red marks immediate danger. Hospitals and dentists avoid black and harsh contrast in waiting areas for the opposite reason. News graphics for storms, terror alerts and epidemics tend to climb from yellow through orange to red, so the top of the scale reads as fear without a word.
Fear in colour, place by place
A small black dot of kajal, the kala tika, is put on a baby's cheek or forehead to protect the child from the evil eye.
A blue glass bead painted as an eye, the nazar, is hung in homes, cars and on children's clothes to turn harm away.
The yurei, the ghost of Japanese folklore and theatre, wears the plain white kimono in which the dead were traditionally dressed for burial.
Great fear is blue in French and Italian: 'une peur bleue', a blue fear, and 'fifa blu', a blue funk.
Gullah Geechee families in South Carolina and Georgia painted porch ceilings pale 'haint blue', said to keep wandering spirits from entering.
The Natyashastra assigns black to bhayanaka, the mood of terror, one of the eight moods of classical Indian drama.
In Brazilian Portuguese a badly scared person is 'branco de susto', white with fright.
From the table of meanings
Under Juan Manuel de Rosas in the 1830s and 1840s, everyone had to wear a scarlet ribbon to show loyalty to his Federalist party. His enemies, the Unitarians, were tied to sky blue.
Politics and protestFearSource: Juan Manuel de RosasThe ancient Egyptians called the desert deshret, the red land. Red was the colour of the god Set, of chaos and of danger, and scribes wrote unlucky words in red ink.
Danger and warningFearSource: RedOn the south coast of Java, visitors are warned not to wear green to the beach. Folk belief holds that it is the colour of Nyai Roro Kidul, the Queen of the Southern Sea, who takes those who wear it.
Danger and warningFearSource: Nyai Roro KidulA dot of black kajal is often put on a baby's cheek or forehead to turn away the evil eye, called nazar. Many people avoid black clothes at weddings and festivals.
Protection and healingFearSource: Evil eyeA crime novel or thriller is called a giallo, a yellow. The name comes from the yellow covers of a series of mysteries that Mondadori began publishing in 1929.
Danger and warningFearSource: GialloThe Blackshirts were the armed squads of Mussolini's Fascist movement. Black shirts were later copied by fascist groups in other countries.
Politics and protestDanger and warningFearSource: BlackshirtsOrange and black are the colours of Halloween, 31 October: orange for pumpkins and autumn leaves, black for night.
Festival and celebrationDanger and warningFearSource: HalloweenColours that carry fear
Sources and further reading
- Pallor on Wikipedia
- Jonauskaite and Mohr, Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of research (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2025)
- Jonauskaite and colleagues, Universal patterns in color-emotion associations (Psychological Science, 2020)
- Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Project Gutenberg
Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.