Reeses Pieces: That ’70s colour

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.

Vancouver is yellow.

There is a wonderful two-page spread in this month’s Walrus magazine wherein Todd Falkowsky explores the signature colours of Canadian cities–colours that seem to identify uniquely with specific urban landscapes. The artist pulled the predominant colours from piles of photographs taken in each of the cities. Hence Toronto is shaded by the blues of its street signs and reds of its transit system; Whitehorse (pictured above) identifies with the glowing green of the Aurora Borealis, Yellowknife a blue-white shade of snow.

Here is a link to the online version of the article:

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.02-detail-todd-falkowsky-revealing-urban-colours/

Falkowsky left out Vancouver. If I were to choose Vancouver’s colours, off the top of my head, three colours stand out: slate grey mountains, blue grey ocean, evergreen Stanley Park. Is it really so dark and dismal here? Yes, actually. Or so it’s easy to believe in the thick of winter. More come to mind–overcast grey rainclouds, cool grey raindrops.

But it’s really not all so dull. For the sake of trying to add a little warmth to the picture, there is also:

Davie Street’s Bubblegum bus stop benches. Red, green and yellow dragons of the Chinese New Year parade. The incandescent glow of Trout Lake’s Illuminares Festival. The proud rainbows of Vancouver’s vibrant gay community.

And yellow: The giant lemony sulphur pile. Granville Island’s cadmium-coloured Bridges Restaurant. The golden rays of an English Bay sunset.