Lighten the Load - With Yellow

Color, you cheeky rascal!

Feb 08, 2026

When life is oppressive, make lemonade. Seriously, life is dumping a cargo ship full of lemons on us all day every day right now, but we persist. We cry, we laugh, we make lemonade, or better yet, lemon meringue (why isn’t this pronounced ‘mar-eng-ay’ for fun?) pie. There’s a line in the movie You’ve Got Mail about daisies in which Meg Ryan says, “I love daisies. They’re so friendly. Don’t you think daisies are the friendliest flower?” I think of this often and replace ‘daisies’ with ‘yellow’, isn’t yellow just the friendliest, cheekiest color?

Is anyone else mentally surprised when they see a pop of yellow? It’s a zesty smile hidden within the tapestry life. In nature, there’re infinite shades, so many in fact that it was difficult to select a cover photo from my gallery. I ultimately selected the cover because the yellow reflection on the water is the highlight of this stunning Florida sunset. Here are some other piercing flashes of yellow within brilliant skyscapes.

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Years ago, Martha Stewart mentioned some outrageous number of coats of yellow paint (only yellow) were required to achieve what your eyes loved about the color chip from your paint store. It was north of 5, because I remember thinking ‘hell to the no, not gonna happen’ when I read it. Online searches didn’t turn up her thoughts, but the paints are much better now, so 2 coats is the new standard.

Here’s what I think. I think we all see colors differently, that there are myriad ways a crowd of people would describe the same painted wall in front of them, and each change their minds several times as the lighting shifts throughout the day. I know it took me several minutes to have the camera see what I saw on some golden-yellow velour curtains I bought to relieve current endless dove gray vista of my window treatments. Well, it turns out there’s science to the physical, emotional, and spiritual reactions we have to color. But more on that in a moment.

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I’m not a person that changes the colors of my walls or furniture very often. However, I do ‘get in the mood’ for certain colors regularly. It’s a driving urge that won’t be denied. After slogging through all the visual and spiritual noise of the fall and winter seasons, spring is a big ‘let’s lift the mood’ time for me. Maybe this is a left over nesting instinct even for those of us who’ve found our life-mates. Maybe this is what drives designers, home improvement stores, and such to speak to us through our eyes almost the moment the winter religious holiday celebrations end.

Over the last 2 weeks and on the heels of my post-holiday stupor, I’ve imagined how my main living spaces would look with cheerful pops of yellow. This didn’t come from ads, I don’t watch ads. It didn’t come from formal color palettes because I’m not painting my home right now and I had difficulty finding yellow things in the local home store. It resulted from my burning desire to import all the warmth, light, and love from the sunshine into my home, to lift my family’s vibration for a bit.

Added touches that 'smile' - canned corn candle, golden velvet panels to relieve the gray next to them, flowers, hand-worked dresser, and fall fair painted jar covered in yellow love

Back to Martha for a moment. This note came up in a blurb from a 1997 blog post by a Virginia Tech student -

Martha's brochure quotes a painter by the name of Ferdinand Leger: "Man needs color to live. It's just as necessary an element as fire and water."

I believe in color’s necessity as much as our expert spiritual, scientific, and philosophical minds do. Color takes up space in our eyes, brains, hearts, and spirits. It lives in a room inside us, rent-free, making more subconscious decisions than we could possibly imagine.

In this article by Jennifer Vitale she speaks of “harmonizing energy through color” and explains the science of the color spectrum, color’s vibrational frequency (“like the hum of a tuning fork”), and Carl Jung’s work on color psychology. Yellow, as it turns out, has a medium-low frequency and lower energy vibration on the spectrum. Psychologically, it’s vibrational frequency equates to emotional responses of happiness, optimism, and hope. I’m exceptionally happy that my drive to ‘brighten’ our lives resulted in a color with such an uplifting emotional response. I can attest that yellow has indeed lightened the load.

I’ll ‘fade to black’, wrapping up this post with a visit with my favorite yellow duet - insects and flowers.