Have you ever started a project and realized right after hitting ‘send’ or ‘start’ that it would be completely different from what you originally thought? That is exactly what happened to me when I decided to ask people around me “What is the color of friendship?”
I thought it would be fun to see what colors people would pick, and if there were a dominant or most popular color. When I started receiving the answers, I quickly realized that this question opened the door to a much bigger conversation.
But before you read the rest of this article, I suggest you pause for a minute and ask yourself: if you were to pick a color for friendship, what would it be? Think about your answer and why you chose this color.
Here are some of the answers I recieved:
A nice rich light-ish Blue. friendly, inviting, engaging.
It’s a tricky question. If someone was blind from birth, how would you describe the color blue? Difficult right? However, in the absence of sight, they probably know how to describe what friendship feels like. So maybe the question is, “what color gives you the feeling that you get from friendship?” For me, that’s blue.
Fuchsia and Magenta. I think about it as vibrant, happy, positive, lovely feeling and versatile. I like the fact that if you add a bit more red or purple, it changes completely the spectrum.
For me personally, friendship encompasses all colors as it has different phases, stages, moods to it. A turbulent time of friendship might be a storm cloud. A happy time a rainbow of every color.
The color of friendship for me is a gradient–it mixes and blends the essence of two people and illuminates their particular-ness (as separate, whole people) as well as emanating their unique and merging togetherness. A gradient, like friendship, is blended, fluid and ever changing.
The first instinct without thinking is that the color of friendship is the same as my favorite color, which is blue. But that’s not the right answer. Too personal. It feels like the color of friendship is actually two colors: with neither of those colors being the same (e.g., not blue and blue). Rather, those two colors seem like they are each based on the uniqueness of individual people as a whole, rather than based on traits that make an individual person. If I were forced to come up with a color, it would be white. Since white is all colors and is alive with brightness and life. There are also black friendships. The absence of light. All absorbing. Maybe these are unhealthy friendships.
I’ll say blue – my favorite shade of blue that is calm and soothing. It’s like a slate blue.
I was thinking it’s like a rainbow. Every friendship is a different color, and they are beautiful. Rainbows are rare, but if you look for them you find them more and more.
It’s Fushia! It’s happy and joyful, like real friendship.
Burgundy is the color of friendship for me. When I think of my friends, I see us enjoying a nice red wine!
My best friend wears black all the time. The color of friendship for me is black.
Friendship has no color. When I’m with my friends, I try to be as transparent as possible, so the color of friendship is clear, no color.
I should have answered this question before asking people around. It is hard for me to get a genuine answer without being influenced by all these remarkably interesting answers. That’s why I suggested you produce your own answer before reading the others.
In any case, my answer may be a cheat because it is borrowing some of what I heard. For me, friendship comes in all colors and shapes and is hard to define by one color, but when you combine all colors of the visible spectrum, you get white!
I would love to hear from you and get your thoughts on this question. It is not meant to be a trick question but simply an invitation to think about friendship from a different angle and maybe add some color to it (pun intended).
— Joe, Xyla Marketing Team