Colour Psychology: Orange

When I wrote my book I carefully created the chapter on colour psychology in order of the colours of the rainbow as that made sense in term of how to approach them. In this series for the blog they have been completely random - often turning up according to what else I was writing about that week. So we began with blue and a new rug from Habitat and moved onto green when I wrote about Biophilia. Today, having looked at yellow and red, we come to orange. Partly because, well why not, and partly because we are talking about colour blocking in the next episode of the podcast, which is out on Thursday, and orange is a good accent colour in schemes like that.

Annie Sloan paints styled by Marianne Cotterill. Orange loves pink and burgundy.

Don't forget it doesn't have to be neon orange. It can be the current fashionable version of the shade that is terracotta so don't panic that it's not for you. There are, as with all colours, many versions of the same thing.

So if red is the toddler of the …