Color personality: what colors say and what research shows

Color personality is the idea that the colors a person likes, picks or lands on in a quiz reveal something about who that person is. Two studies reach different conclusions on whether color preference relates to personality. One study of 854 Korean adults found a weak link, with color preference explaining up to 5% of the differences in any Big Five trait, and a study of 323 French-speaking participants confirmed none of the 11 predictions it tested.

Seasonal color analysis is a different subject. It ignores which colors a person likes and judges only which shades look best next to the face, and the personal color guide covers it.

What is color personality?

The term covers three different ideas about color and character.

One is research that asks whether the colors people prefer relate to measured personality traits. Another is the color personality quiz, which sorts people into color types, from four-color sorts to this site’s eight. The third is the association of a color with a trait, such as red with enthusiasm, which Jue and Ha (2022) measured directly in a survey.

The quiz on this site belongs to the second group. It is built for self-reflection, and none of the studies cited on this page validates it or any other color sort.

What colors describe your personality? What 854 adults linked to each word

When 854 Korean adults matched colors to personality words, red was the top color for both “enthusiastic” and “easily upset.”

Jue and Ha (2022) published the data in Frontiers in Psychology. Participants were recruited online and matched 20 personality adjectives to ten colors: red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, purple, white, gray and black. Participants could pick a maximum of three colors per word. Table 1 of the paper reports the top three colors for each adjective and the share of participants who picked each.

The same color led words of very different tone. Red was the top color for “enthusiastic” and for “easily upset,” and it also led “quarrelsome” (32.5%). Purple was the top color for both “anxious” and “complex.” Green led both “dependable” and “emotionally stable.”

No top color reached half of the participants. Across all 20 adjectives, the top color’s share ran from 16.2% (“reserved,” white) to 44.0% (“easily upset,” red).

These figures are the share of participants who linked a color to a word. They do not describe what people who like a color are like, and they do not define what a color means for any one person. The authors also state that color preferences and senses of color often differ across ages, genders and cultures, and the sample is Korean adults.

What are the four color personality types?

The research reviewed here contains no standard list of four color personality types.

Some commercial personality tests sort people into four colors.

In our view, a shared set of four cannot be assumed, since each test of that kind is free to supply its own labels for its four colors. Four is a design choice.

This site uses eight colors instead. The quiz places a person at one main color and one secondary color from the eight, so a result is a pair of colors.

The eight personality colors on this site

This site’s quiz sorts a person into one main and one secondary color out of eight, based on four trait scores.

The Color Personality Test has 24 questions and takes about 4 minutes. It scores four traits from 0 to 100: Energy (Quiet & Inward to Outgoing & Bright), Feeling (Head-First Logic to Heart-First Empathy), Structure (Go-with-the-Flow to Plan-It-Out) and Imagination (Down-to-Earth to Dreaming Big). Sixteen of the questions are scenarios with four answer choices, and the other eight ask for agreement on a five-point scale.

The eight colors are ranked by how close each sits to the four scores. The closest is the main color, the second closest is the secondary color, and the result title is the main color’s type name, with the secondary color shown as a label under it. The report also gives a match percentage for the main color and a similarity percentage for each of the eight colors. Each main color has a fixed best-match color and a fixed color to watch. There are no sub-types, and combinations are not given names of their own.

The quiz’s colors and the ten colors in Jue and Ha’s study are different sets. Red in the study went with both “enthusiastic” and “easily upset,” while Spark Red in the quiz is defined by its position on the four traits.

Which color personality is rarest?

Rarity depends on how a test defines its categories and who takes it, so no ranking of rare color personalities is offered.

Color preference is not personality: what the research shows

In a study of 854 Korean adults, color preference explained no more than 5% of the differences in any Big Five trait.

Jue and Ha (2022) asked participants to rank ten colors from favorite to least favorite and to complete the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), a ten-question measure of the Big Five traits. The participants ranged in age from 20 to 60, and the survey ran entirely online.

Extraversion showed no significant correlation with any color preference. A separate group comparison in the same paper found that strongly extraverted participants preferred green more than weakly extraverted ones, a result the authors describe as unexpected. For the other four traits, every significant correlation fell between 0.07 and 0.16 in absolute size. The largest was between red preference and emotional stability (−0.16), and light blue preference correlated positively with agreeableness (0.12), conscientiousness (0.13) and emotional stability (0.13).

The regression results put a size on the pattern. Color preferences significantly predicted every trait except extraversion, but the explained share, R², topped out at 0.05.

An R² of 0.05 means the color preferences in the model together account for about 5% of the variation in that trait’s scores in this sample and leave the rest unexplained. The authors write that “the correlation coefficients were fairly small, and thus the correlations were not very strong, only showing rough trends.” They add that the TIPI could be coarse compared with a detailed questionnaire and that the generalizability of findings from Korean adults is limited.

The study did not test any color quiz, so it cannot vouch for one, including the quiz on this site.

Another study found no link. Jonauskaite and colleagues (2021) derived 11 testable predictions about favorite colors and personality traits from claims on six popular websites and tested them on 323 French-speaking participants. The abstract reports that none of the 11 predictions was confirmed and concludes that favorite colors appear unrelated to personality. The two studies differ in sample, personality measure and analysis, so their results are mixed.

A separate line of work asks why people like the colors they like. The abstract of Palmer and Schloss (2010) proposes that color preferences arise from people’s average emotional responses to objects associated with each color, for example blues with clear skies and clean water. That is a theory about liking colors, and the abstract does not address personality.

Why a general description can feel accurate

The Forer effect, also called the Barnum effect, describes how people rate vague, general statements as accurate descriptions of their own personalities.

The Forer half of the name refers to Forer’s 1949 paper, “The fallacy of personal validation: a classroom demonstration of gullibility.” The abstract of Dickson and Kelly’s 1985 review concludes that acceptance of such statements depends on how relevant and how favorable they are and, to some extent, on the type of assessment. The abstract of Furnham and Schofield’s 1987 review describes a critical look at almost 50 studies of the effect.

The effect concerns how readily people accept general descriptions. It does not mean every color test is wrong, and it does not show that any particular test is right.

In our reading, a swap check separates general wording from specific wording: when a different color’s description fits just as well, the wording is general, and a fit that feels right then says little about whether the test measures anything.

Can a color personality test be used at work?

Nothing cited on this page supports using a four-color test to decide hiring or performance.

The closest evidence is general. In 2007, an article by Morgeson and five co-authors, whose abstract says that five former editors of Personnel Psychology and the Journal of Applied Psychology reconsider the research on personality tests in selection, concluded that the issue with personality tests in selection is “the very low validity of personality tests for predicting job performance,” and that using published self-report personality tests in selection contexts should be reconsidered. The abstract adds that personality constructs may have value for selection, but that future research should look for alternatives to self-report measures. A later reply from the same authors states that their criticisms apply only to the selection context, not to all research on personality.

Both papers concern self-report personality tests used for selection, so they support a general principle.

In our view, a four-color result works as conversation material, such as an icebreaker in a team chat, and is a poor basis for hiring, promotion or performance reviews. The same holds for this site’s eight-color quiz, which is built for self-reflection. A non-color model of workplace communication is covered in the DISC personality guide.

How to use a color result

Our view: a color result works as a starting point for self-observation, not as a label or a diagnosis, because it summarizes the answers given in one sitting.

The color personality quiz on this site reports four trait scores from 0 to 100 next to the main and secondary colors, which gives something concrete to compare with real behavior. A high Structure score sets up a comparison with a week of plans that were actually followed, and a high Energy score with how a week of social plans felt.

Comparing results with a friend works the same way. Two people with the same main color may differ on the secondary color, and the four trait scores show where.

A result does not replace a conversation with a licensed professional about mood, stress or relationships, and it does not support decisions about jobs or health.

For a personality model that researchers measure, the Big Five guide explains how trait scores are read, and the 16 personality types guide covers a four-letter sort.