Can blue lighting reduce suicides?

We all intuitively associate certain colors with being calming—I’ve never seen a dentist’s office painted red, for example.

But I’m always curious if there’s science to back up our intuitions. There certainly doesn’t need to be for something to be valid, but it’s neat to see our feelings corroborated by molecules.

In the case of color, there are hundreds of “what colors cause what moods!” lists, but almost no systematic research has been done.

In 2009, blue lights were installed in some of Tokyo’s train stations. Researchers then looked at the number of suicides between 2000 and 2013, and compared them to neighboring train stations without blue lights. The result was impressive- suicides dropped by 74% at the stations where the blue lights were installed. The trend caught on in London in 2014, and anecdotally helped there too, but ultimately, the practice didn’t spread much further because there still isn’t an explanation for it (is blue actually calming, or did it just create an unusual environment?)

So the answer to whether certain colors provide us calm is, for the time being, completely subjective. It’s not unlike clutter elevating cortisol—if clutter or a color feels *tense* to you, it’s worth changing. If blue feels serene to you, it might be worth painting a room blue. Both green and blue interiors are having quite a moment lately—do you think it’s an attempt to find calm during and after the year 2020? Ha!