Juicy colour
February 20, 2008
A photo of the juice I was drinking today at work. I totally did not expect this colour to come out of the green and yellow tetrapak. It looked quite beautiful under the fluorescent lighting. The picture doesn’t really do it justice.
Reeses Pieces: That ’70s colour
February 14, 2008
With all the candy coated colours available, why are Reese’s Pieces just orange, yellow and brown?
These are the colours of the 1970s. I grew up in a house that was built in the ’70s, complete with orange and brown carpets. This was the colour scheme of my dad’s old sweaters, the decor in Niagara College (est. 1967) and the seating in older TTC Subway cars in Toronto (the newer ones are red and blue, incidentally, two of the colours ascribed to the city in the Walrus article). What year did Reese’s Pieces first hit the market? 1978.
Other associations with this colour combination include: nature and farming (as in, soil, hay, prairie sunsets . . . lending a natural, homegrown ethos to its subjects), autumn leaves in the countryside, and speaking of fall, Halloween—a perfect colour scheme, in fact, to match a candy-giving holiday.
Reese’s Pieces are a different flavour from their cousins Smarties and M&Ms on the inside, yet they share similar outer characteristics—so they need something that will visually set them apart. I suppose if you were to sample colours from the above photo, you would come up with yellows, browns and oranges—and no greens, blues, reds or violets. Reese’s Pieces are, basically, the colour of peanuts.
