Favourite colours

Our daughter has been attending a new school while we are in Milan. They asked the children to bring their own sets of coloured pencils to be used in art classes.

Here is the state of our daughter’s set after one month of use. I thought that the remaining length of the pencils is a nice visual representations of which colours she favours and by how much.

I wanted to take this picture, because it seems to me straight out of “The Day the Crayons Quit” by Drew Daywalt, and illustrated by the great Oliver Jeffers. Our daughter received this book as a birthday present, but I might have enjoyed it even more than she did.

Not to over-analyze our daughter, but I think the picture shows that she prefer bright colours overall. The exceptions are the white, which is not a very practical colour for drawing on white paper anyway, and the dark yellow, which is a bit redundant, given the that there are two other yellow pencils in this set, both of them well-used. And of course, pink is still the strong favourite.

Incidentally, I once heard in popular science television show in Japan that there was a correlation between the preference for pink colour and health of middle-aged and elderly women. The hypothesis was that liking the pink colour, which is traditionally associated with youth, encourages women to maintain a youthful state of mind, which in turn leads to better health.

Even if there no causation here, I am glad that our daughter sees the world mostly in bright colours. I hope this trend continues as she grows up, and her brightly-coloured pencils and crayons will always be stubby.