A review by brnineworms
The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St. Clair

informative lighthearted reflective relaxing fast-paced

4.0

The Secret Lives of Colour is not designed to be read cover-to-cover; it’d be more suitable as a coffee table book, or a book kept on a nightstand so that a couple of pages can be read each evening before bed. I read it over the course of a few days, and I recognise I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t taken this approach.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, though. I remember I particularly liked the sections on Chrome Yellow, Puce, and Cobalt. I liked the way many sections focused on a specific historical figure – often the discoverer of a pigment or someone who popularised a colour or transformed its symbolic meaning. I was also introduced to the mediaeval taboo against mixing colours, which was an important note in the chapters on green and brown pigments. Given my background in art and design, I was expecting to already know most of the facts this book had to offer. The wealth of new information was a pleasant surprise.

St Clair’s area of expertise is fashion, and it shows. Clothing and cosmetics are discussed more often than fine art. Which is fine! But I was hoping for more art history. The section on Ginger, for example, very briefly mentions Titian, but it’s mostly about famous redheads from history and in fiction. There are also several sections which really delve into namesake substances but spend very little time exploring the pigments themselves and their history of use. Of course, with the way the book is structured, it’s inevitably going to be somewhat cursory. The problem is that it tends to veer off on tangents and focus on the wrong things (in my opinion).

The introduction opens with a primer on colour vision which seems a bit extraneous. Sure, it is technically an introduction to colour, but the study of colour in art and the study of colour in science are two very different disciplines – wavelengths aren’t relevant here. And it’s not as though colour as a concept needs an introduction, so I don’t really see the purpose of all that to begin with.

All in all, The Secret Lives of Colour is a decent book. I did learn a lot, but there’s also a lot that could have been cut or that could have been added. Still, I liked it well enough.

CONTENT WARNINGS: racism, fascism, colonialism, slavery, war, death, murder, suicide, illness/disease, drugs, alcohol, blood, urine, excrement, and sex all talked about though never in graphic detail