Barbie and the Neuroscience of Color

What Barbie can tell us about our brains and color

Greta Gerwig’s live-action Barbie has become the cinematic and cultural phenomenon of 2023. Over the summer, pink-clad moviegoers—two-thirds of them female, and three-quarters under the age of 29—flocked to theaters worldwide, propelling Barbie to the year’s highest-earning film, grossing $1.4 billion in global revenue. It has become the highest-grossing film by a solo female director, the biggest box office success ever for Warner Bros, and the most successful film of all time in Ireland, where it surpassed James Cameron’s previous record-holders Avatar and Titanic. 

Warner Bros and Mattel also partnered with brands to create the “Barbiecore” fashion trend. After paparazzi photographs from the Barbie film set went viral in June 2022, showing Margot Robbie in a hot-pink Western outfit, searches for pink clothing shot up by 416 percent. Since the film’s release, French fashion magazine Marie Claire reports that sales of blonde hair dye have increased by 47 percent, while sales of scrunchies are up a massive 1,099 percent.

Sales of Barbie dolls have jumped, too, increasing by 25 percent in the months following the film’s release. Incidentally, that’s a rare item of good news for children’s social development in the age of screen addiction. A 2020 study examined how the prefrontal and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) regions of the brain—those associated with social interactions—reacted while young children played with dolls and played games on tablets. Children who played with dolls, whether in groups or on their own, actively engaged their pSTS, while kids playing on tablets did not. This suggests that dolls afford children key opportunities to imagine and practice social and emotional skills, in ways screen-based activities don’t.

Barbie begins with an overt homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, showing old-fashioned children playing with old-fashioned dolls. Into this primeval scene steps an enormously tall, impossibly fashionable Margot Robbie, to the sounds of Strauss’s iconic Also Sprach Zarathustra. After this evolutionary leap forward for girls and dolls, the film takes viewers to the dazzlingly pink plastic world of Barbie Land, a modern feminist utopia where beautiful, empowered Barbies pursue impressive careers while men exist as accessories, idling their time away on the beach. So eye-wateringly pink is Barbie Land that designing the movie set created a global shortage of pink paint.

Viewers might imagine how life would feel in such a monochromatically pink world—which invites questions about how humans perceive color that go back to the ancient Greeks. They even attracted commentary from nineteenth-century British prime minister and trained classicist William Gladstone, who proposed that Homer and other Greeks saw colors mainly as light/dark contrasts rather than as hues, hence Homer’s repeated references to a “wine-dark sea” rather than, say, a “blue sea.” These questions continue to preoccupy researchers today.

Modern neuroscience suggests that color plays a key role in cognitive functioning, helping us differentiate visual stimuli, as well as to categorize and remember information. Studies have found, for instance, that we remember colors better than we remember shapes, that we recall images in color better than images in black and white, and that we pay most attention to high-contrast color combinations, such as the famous yellow and red McDonald’s arches.

Pink is an attention-grabbing color, but what if almost everything were pink, as in Barbie Land? How would that affect our cognitive processing? Mike Webster, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Scientific American that if someone hypothetically had been exposed predominantly to pink for her entire life, she wouldn’t necessarily register that color as pink; instead, she would see it as we do gray or another neutral shade. In short, moviegoers find a monochromatic pink Barbie Land visually intense because it is so different from what we are accustomed to—but if Barbie herself were to experience a polychromatic world, after a lifetime of seeing only pink, she would find the color variation overwhelming. She would probably also undergo significant cognitive shifts in terms of how she absorbed, categorized, and remembered information.

The same article describes a 2019 experiment in which researchers used a sodium light to cast a yellow tint on a room, turning all objects in it yellow. Neuroscientist Bevil Conway, who led the study, noted that the only exception was photographs of human faces, which participants consistently reported to be green. Conway suggested that the participants remembered what faces normally look like and were modulating the color cognitively—thus showing that not only does perception influence cognition, but that cognition also influences perception.

Color also seems to play a role in political ideology. In examining the logos of more than 300 parties in democratic countries, a 2022 study found a strong relationship between colors used in parties’ branding and those parties’ positions on the ideological spectrum: Left-wing parties mainly use colors at the high-wavelength end of the color spectrum (notably red), while right-wing parties prefer colors at the low-wavelength end (notably blue). This tendency may appear reversed in the United States, where we speak of conservative-leaning “red states” and liberal-leaning “blue states”—however, the logos of the Republican and Democratic parties both contain relatively equal proportions of red and blue, and the “red state”/“blue state” nomenclature is of recent origin. Associations between ideologies and colors do arise partly from tradition, and are strongest in Western Europe. However, neuroscience continues to explore key aspects of how our brain responds to different colors and color combinations, suggesting that the associations may not be arbitrary. And if they are indeed not arbitrary—if high-wavelength and low-wavelength colors both drive polarization—we also should ask which colors can bring people together and promote mutual understanding.

Color plays key roles in influencing attention, perception, memory, emotion, and even potentially ideology in ways that are not yet fully understood. As the neuroscience of color advances, so too does the potential for using color more systematically as a key narrative strategy in visual storytelling, as well as potentially a way to reduce toxic polarization. We will keep studying and posting about this as new science emerges.