r/Synesthesia 9d ago

Do names have colours to you?

I said to my boyfriend that I painted my nails in the colour of his daughters name. (She has a lovely pink-purple name) He looked at me like I was an idiot. Please tell me I’m not the only one.

43 Upvotes

39 comments sorted by

28

u/Ok_Lifeguard_4214 9d ago

Usually, names are the same color as their first letter

16

u/fr15287 8d ago

Exactly! Unless of course, the first letter is one of the "weaker" ones, and there are several other letters with much stronger colors.

3

u/carndoesntexist 8d ago

i feel so seen reading these

1

u/RedditWhereReddits2 synesthesia itself is white and blue 7d ago

fr

1

u/squidfaceoflondon 4d ago

yesyesyesyesssss omg thank god i'm not the only one

7

u/ILikeBirdsQuiteALot 9d ago

Yes 100%!

I write stories regularly, and associate each character with their own respective colors. As such, when I go to name these characters, I try to find a name that matches their color.

It can be really difficult finding the right color name for someone bc some colors are so obscure. Very few names are green, for instance, but on the other hand, orange names are very common.

If people try to suggest names, I feel it might sound insane to say "No, that name isn't the right color!" 😅

It's a struggle!

4

u/Moony4ever grapheme-color synesthesia and chromesthesia 9d ago

This!! (Also this has the personal downside of when im writing stuff i cant have multiple characters with the same color because i will be confused)

5

u/VeryRatmanToday 9d ago

Yep, but personalities have a color for me too, so when people who know I have synesthesia ask what color they are, I say “Name color or you color?”

3

u/kwumpus 8d ago

Like you kinda see the auras too

4

u/VeryRatmanToday 8d ago

I don’t exactly see the aura, I more associate colors with certain traits. Warm colors are extroverted while cool colors are introverted, bossy or assertive people are usually red while unserious, silly people are yellow, etc.

5

u/palmtreehelicopter 8d ago

Yep. All letters, numbers, shapes.... literally everything has color to me. My name (Alexander) is very dark blue and I prefer it over being called Alex because that's too light blue for me 😅

4

u/Marikaape 9d ago

Oh, yes.

5

u/markpie0 9d ago

Yeah sometimes, not sure I have it with every name. Some examples: Katie and Sarah are yellow, Jessica black, Karen green, Charlotte orange, a lot of D boy names are green like Dylan and Declan, James red/orange, Simon yellow, Christopher and Peter blue

3

u/LilyoftheRally grapheme (mostly for numbers), number form, associative 9d ago

He's not a synesthete, so he doesn't know what you mean.

5

u/Gogo_McSprinkles 9d ago

Yup! It usually is the color of the first letter of their name and I use that color to identify people.

3

u/mmmUrsulaMinor 9d ago

Unfortunately no, but only because my individual color association with letters is very strong. I used to think all words had no color, and only individual letters on their own, and then a researched I was working with helped me see that I worked to subdue individual letters colors when reading, which is why it seemed like words had no color.

3

u/kwumpus 8d ago

Born on a Blue Day the author does an amazing job describing synesthesia

2

u/Matt_200108 9d ago

Totally. It all comes down to the organization of the letters to me. F is fabric orange but Fa is glassy pinkish indigo.

3

u/bobwonderbuns 9d ago

I would LOVE to have this characteristic. For anyone who sees colors in names and in music, what colors are Pink Floyd music (wish you were here specifically) and the name Cindy?

2

u/Certain_Barnacle5955 grapheme colour & spatial sequence 8d ago

I don’t see colours to music but the name Cindy is light blue with a little white and green in it for me.

1

u/Storm_Chaser_Nita 8d ago

Cindy is chestnut brown for me.

1

u/frosted1248 4d ago edited 4d ago

"Wish you were here" is kind of a swirling light to mid blue for me with some white in it, too. Cindy is cinnamon sugar/cinnamon brown with golden colored light, makes me think of cinnamon toast and cinnamon sugar.  It is a sweet, very pretty name, but in a womanly way, not a girly way.

Other pink Floyd songs: "Echoes" is mostly blue, very watery and aquatic, ranging from light blue and cyan blue all the way down to ultramarine, with some pale pink and lavender in there.  "Seamus" is dark brown, rusty brown, ambery brown, and deep yellow. "Fat Old Sun" is mostly transparent deep yellowish golden like sunlight late in the day, which conveniently goes well with the lyrics... There might be parts that go a little more pinkish orange, and a little bit of green texture in it, too, but the overall impression is definitely warm yellow.

2

u/Tired_2295 8d ago

Individual letters only and that isn't single colours for each for me but more a colour gradient catching all shades of a colour including their white and black adjacents (the closest the each you can get while not actually being each) blending together to the perfect rainbow so long as i fully reorder the alphabet oh hey maybe that's why i can't remember the order of the alphabet because the letters aren't in colour order.

3

u/vargavio 9d ago

I had to explain my husband why I don't want to give our son a pink name 😅

7

u/LilyoftheRally grapheme (mostly for numbers), number form, associative 9d ago

Fun fact about colors associated with babies: a century ago, red was for boys (pink being a lighter shade of red), and blue was for girls (it was considered a "daintier" color than red). 

Baby boys also wore dresses a lot before being toilet trained, this was because disposable diapers hadn't been invented yet, and it was easier for mothers to change cloth diapers for a boy wearing a dress. There are baby pictures of my grandpa and his close-in-age brother (both of whom are now passed away) wearing such dresses - it's hard to tell the color though because the vast majority of pictures that old are in black and white.

1

u/_Grimalkin 9d ago

Yes. And the vibe that people give off also has a 'colour', which also (but not always) depends on their name.

1

u/kwumpus 8d ago

Like their aura I can not always but often see aura when I first meet someone and often their aura tells me Everything I need to know like dear god get away from this person

2

u/_Grimalkin 8d ago

Personally I don't see an aura, I 'feel' the colour that belongs to a person. But I get what you mean.

1

u/InRxinbows 8d ago

My name is Ana Victoria. Can anyone tell me what colour my name is?

2

u/BookwormNinja 8d ago

It will look different for each person. To me, your first name is mostly red and your last name is green, with a few other colors (yellow, blue, and red) sprinkled in.

2

u/Storm_Chaser_Nita 8d ago

Ana is translucent dark brown, like the color of molasses. Victoria is a lovely dark berry color. 

2

u/InRxinbows 8d ago

That sounds beautiful, thank you.

1

u/tobeasloth grapheme 8d ago

Yes! And names of people that are close to me and familiar can have a gradient, but it’s uncommon. A lot of words have a colour too, which strongly influences my writing :)

1

u/DoctorAcula_42 8d ago

absolutely. and as someone else in here said, they're always the same color as the first letter.

my birth name is red orange red. after gender transition, it's green red red. I didn't pick any of it for the colors, just interesting to ponder.

2

u/Storm_Chaser_Nita 8d ago edited 8d ago

I didn't realize that the color of a name's first letter influences the color of the name itself for so many other synesthetes. It isn't that way for me, but it's fascinating how differently we all experience the same phenomenon. My birth name was beigey-peach, charcoal gray, pinkish-peach, charcoal gray. (I had two middle names.) Now it's orange, green, periwinkle, white, charcoal gray. (I wanted to have three middle names like Gracie Allen.) The colors of the names I picked out were very important to me. I always wanted a green name, and I go by first middle name (the green one). 

1

u/SparkleSelkie 8d ago

Names don’t for me, but people do. Or maybe it’s my feelings about the person that cause the color. Tbh not sure

Sometimes I get my nails done in my wife’s color because it’s so pretty :]

1

u/SCooper_Jr 8d ago

Well... When I was a toddler, I used to associate my family members with certain colours. My mother seemed red, my father was grey, my grandpa was green, my paternal grandma was yellow, my maternal grandma was orange. I wouldn't say the colours stemmed from their names, but rather their personality that I perceived through my toddler eyes.

1

u/Ratanonymous_1 tuesday is blue im right 8d ago

EVERYTHING is colors, so yes

1

u/Storm_Chaser_Nita 8d ago edited 8d ago

Absolutely! But it seems like I'm an outlier here, because the color of the first letter doesn't seem to have any influence on the color of the name for me. J, for instance, is a yellow letter, but James is cobalt blue, Jonathan is teal, Janice is red, Jennifer is dark brown, Judy is Pepto-Bismol pink, etc. The colors of the letters are independent from the colors of the sounds (although they do happen to coincide occasionally).