Gold psychology and its attraction

Gold psychology and its attraction

Gold is a predominant feature of festivals and celebrations in some cultures and the idea of gold as a colour is intimately connected with our idea of gold as a material. When we think of the colour gold, images of grandeur and extravagance are likely to come to our mind. For millennia, the metal has adorned crowns and hilts of swords and has been used to enhance paintings and ornaments to increase their value. In Eastern cultures, the metal is an integral part of auspicious occasions like marriages and festivals by way of gifts and sacred rituals. Gold also features heavily on the attires of brides and grooms throughout South Asia. Humans’ fascination with gold is as old as time itself. The scarce material has a certain appeal to it.

Empires have flourished by possessing gold, wars have been fought to control regions harbouring rich deposits of the metal and treasure hunters and explorers have spent a lifetime in search of it. But were they fascinated by the metal or its colour? The two can be hard to distinguish since there is a crossover between gold as a material and gold as a colour and the two feed off each other. The idea of gold as a colour is intimately connected with our idea of gold as a material. So, when we think of it as a colour, we unconscious-ly relate to the precious metal, which in turn conjures images of wealth and success.

In the book “Gold: Nature and Culture,” art historian Rebecca Zorach and filmmaker and critic Mi-chael Phillips Jr. write that in the Andean region, the sharp, eye-catching visual effects of shine, gleam, glint, glitter, glow, and strong colours were all considered the phenomena of sacredness. That led to the metal being associated with a shining, otherworldly character attributed to the gods in the religions of many different cultures. Some of these were bodily associations, the au-thors write. The Aztecs described gold as the “excrement of the gods,” while the Incas thought of it as the “sweat of the sun.” In ancient Egypt, gold was considered the “flesh of the gods.” Across cultures, it was a sacred material. In ancient Egypt gold was considered the "flesh of the gods".

Chinese alchemists believed that drinking potable gold in the form of elixirs, eating from gold plates and using gold utensils helped attain longevity. Before the 20th century, gold was used to treat conditions as varied as syphilis, heart disease, smallpox and melancholia. Today, gold com-pounds are still thought to have some anti-inflammatory effects.
The incorruptible nature of gold has an otherworldly allure to it and the reflective quality of the metal gives the impression that it glows from the inside and when viewed by candlelight, gilded medieval manuscripts, statues and icons in the Eastern Orthodox Church exuded a transcendental quality, glowing as if they were illuminated from the inside.

The colour gold causes the eye to move because of the glistening and seemingly moveable surface, like the way water moves. Hu-man eyes are always attracted to any surface that has that glistening or undulating movement. This is because humans need water in order to survive.
The origin of gold is closely tied to the sun and it is connected to all things that grow and thrive as the sun enables that growth. Human vision can discriminate millions of colours, but it can discrim-inate trillions of chromatures coloured textures. It is the chromature that targets the human emo-tions more specifically than uniform colour patches. Some believe that the reason, chromatures can target human emotions more specifically than uniform colour patches, is that they contain far more information than colour patches.

Companies are using genetic algorithms to evolve chromatures, and target specific emotions they want people to experience with respect to their product or brand. It turns out to be quite power-ful. A company might, for instance, want to convey the idea that their product is soft and warm. Then we would start with closeup images of patches of soft things, such as the fur of a rabbit and the down of a goose, and warm things, such as glowing embers of charcoal or a warm sunset.

In ancient Rome and medieval Europe, sumptuary laws prohibited people from wearing too much gold, or not wearing it at all unless they were from a noble family. Gold leaf has been used liberally in artwork which hinted at the status of the patron who commissioned it. All societies value gold and investing in gold has survived for centuries through marketing, even glorified. Gold carries with it the messaging that you should own it. It is a learned, conditioned response.

In popular culture, musicians flaunt their gold bling. The underlying message being that they are good at what they do and have amassed a lot of wealth. In a lot of cultures, the word for money derives from the word for gold. In China, the ideogram for money is the ideogram for gold. Gold continues to be featured heavily in religion and religious rituals alike. It decorates the papal rega-lia, spires, domes and minarets of temples, churches, monasteries and mosques worldwide.

Golden trophies like Olympic medals, the Nobel Prize, Oscars and Emmys are presented to people who display a unique talent. The idea is the prize made of a rare material is given to people with display talent as rare as the material. Psychologically, this results in gold being a colour of motivation.