Abstract
Can basic tastes, such as sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and possibly also umami, be conveyed by means of colour? If so, how should we understand the relationship between colours and tastes: Is it universal or relative, innate or acquired, unidirectional or bidirectional? Here, we review the growing body of scientific research showing that people systematically associate specific colours with particular tastes. We highlight how these widely shared bidirectional crossmodal correspondences generalize across cultures and stress their difference from synaesthesia (with which they are often confused). The various explanations that have been put forward to account for such crossmodal mappings are then critically evaluated. Finally, we go on to look at some of the innovative ways in which chefs, culinary artists, designers, and marketers are taking—or could potentially push further—the latest insights from research in this area as inspiration for their own creative endeavours.
Highlights
The idea that the four or five basic tastes—bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and possibly umami—are in some way associated with particular colours is one that has widespread currency
The mapping of colour onto taste, or vice versa, has been based on the intuitions of the creative or designer involved, or else on the crossmodal associations apparently experienced by a few synaesthetes for whom the experience of taste comes with a conscious experience of colour—what is known as a concurrent (e.g. [23])
The key question here, though, is whether we can ever be sure that the mappings that have been suggested by writers and designers really do appeal to a wider audience? An intriguing body of empirical research conducted over the last three decades shows that all of us do match basic tastes to colours in ways that are far from arbitrary—in the sense of being regular across individuals and consistent over time [24, 28, 35, 65, 71]
Summary
The idea that the four or five basic tastes—bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and possibly umami—are in some way associated with particular colours is one that has widespread currency. In one of the first studies of its kind to have been conducted in this area, O’Mahony [35] had 51 students at the University of California, Davis pick 1 of 12 colours (comprising black, blue, brown, gold, green, yellow, grey, orange, red, silver, violet, and white) to match each of the four basic taste words (bitter, salty, sour, and sweet). The results revealed that the black colour patch was associated with bitterness, green with sourness, pink with sweetness, and white with a salty taste (see Fig. 2) Note how these results are broadly consistent with those reported in the other studies that have been documented (see Table 2). These results are interesting in that they show that individually, people are not all that confident that the crossmodal mappings between colours and tastes are shared. Notice how it is
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