Feng Shui and the Proper Use of Colors
I receive lots of inquiries regarding what colors to choose for certain rooms based on feng shui principles. People often try to figure out on their own the correct colors for an area based on what they are reading in popular books.
 
There are three common mistakes that are being made:
 
Some people are choosing colors based on their own personal “Gua” or Trigram. As an example, a person born in 1961 is the CHEN trigram, which is associated with the Wood element and the color green. To paint your bedroom green because of this could easily be a mistake and not cater to the inherent energies of the room.
 
Some books outline the inherent elements (and colors) associated with a particular direction and readers think that those are the appropriate colors. As an example, the south direction is associated with fire and people think it is correct to make the south room in the house red! This is wrong about 80% of the time.
 
The third common mistake is regarding the arbitrary color assignments given to different sections of the house based on the New Age Bagua Map (Black Hat School of feng shui.) I have to remind students and clients continually that the Bagua Map (with the Wealth corner and the Marriage corner) was invented less than thirty years ago and has very little to do with traditional feng shui. The Black Hat school recommends certain colors for those 8 imaginary life stations, based partly on western color psychology (i.e.pink in the Marriage corner) and partly on a misinterpretation of the “later-heaven sequence” of the Lo-shu grid.