Coloured Lights

In this day and age, lights of a million colours are available to us—all shades of greens, oranges, blues, reds, and the list goes on.

But for some reason, when it comes to lighting, most people default to yellow.

Why is that? Why, given our panoply of colours, do we always default to the same old yellow?

Maybe it’s because yellow has been used in lighting for ages: candles emit yellow light, the original Edison bulbs did too, and even in more recent days, due to some chemical ingredients, streetlights were yellow. And of course, the Sun’s rays, for the most part, seem to be yellow.

And theoretically, if yellow is the colour we’ve grown up with, always been comfortable with, and always associated home and hearth with, maybe we’d come to like yellow as the colour of our homes.

Of course, we could always go with the more vulgar reason that yellow lights are the cheapest, and the reason that people only have yellow lights is because they’re really cheap. (That’s probably not it.)

Or maybe it’s because yellow, of all the colours, is quite illuminating (compared to red, green or blue lights, which are rather dark), but not so illuminating to the point where it’s just plain blinding people, like white light.

Or maybe yellow light just seems the most natural.

Or maybe I’m just overthinking this.

via Daily Prompt: Yellow