Kassia St. Clair is a freelance journalist and author based in London. She graduated from Bristol University with a first-class honors degree in history in 2007 and went on to do a master’s degree at Oxford. There she wrote her dissertation on women’s masquerade costumes during the eighteenth century and graduated with distinction. She has since written about design and culture for publications including The Economist, House & Garden, Quartz, and the New Statesman. She has had a column about color in Elle Decoration since 2013 and is a former assistant books and arts editor for The Economist.
“Beautifully written and thoughtfully produced . . . Full of
anecdotes and fascinating research, this elegant compendium has all
the answers.”
—Nina Martyris, NPR’s Best Books of 2017
“If you adore color, you’ll love The Secret Lives of Color. This
passionate and majestic compedium . . . will leave you bathed in
the gorgeous optics of light.”
—Elle
“A kaleidoscope of charming, discursive essays . . . A light
and lively guide [that] offers plenty of fresh clues for the
brain’s colorful calculations.”
—The Economist
“Fascinating.”
—BuzzFeed
“Gorgeous.”
—The Guardian
“The history of colors, it turns out, is the story of science as
well as art. Kassia St. Clair’s entertaining book brings them both
into vivid relief.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair presents
readers with [an] opportunity to relish in otherwise mundane
aspects of reality. . . . An engaging mix of aesthetic analysis and
optical science, it could make anyone a keen observer of our
kaleidoscopic world.”
—Popular Science
“Riveting . . . diligently researched . . . Whatever your opinion
of a shade, The Secret Lives of Color provides some
illuminating perspectives on it.”
—Hyperallergic
“A mind-expanding tour of the world without leaving your paintbox.
Every color has a story, and here are some of the most alluring,
alarming, and thought-provoking.”
—Simon Garfield, New York Times bestselling author
of Just My Type: A Book About Fonts
“St. Clair delivers a mix of science, humor, and art history in
this collection of bite-sized essays on the cultural and social
lore of colors. . . . Her sentences guarantee sustained reading. .
. . [Her] rhetoric beautifies the form of the brief essay.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Secret Lives of Color holds surprise and satisfaction at
every striation of the rainbow.”
—Booklist
“Brimming with facts, historical insights and curious tales.”
—Elle Decoration
“Weirdly fascinating.”
—Wired
“Charming.”
—The Financial Times
“Fascinating insights . . . a lexicon of colors, simultaneously
revealing the cultural attitudes that determine our responses to
them.”
—Country Living
“What The Secret Lives of Color offers really is, in some
sense, a flash portrait of human civilization, a zigzagging and
unpredictable exploration of how significantly color has shaped
histories and disciplines, fueled empires, changed the nature of
war and caused species to flourish or face extinction.”
—Chemistry World
“A must for anyone interested in color [or] decorating, but also
language, culture and art.”
—The Chromologist
“A work of art in its own right, The Secret Lives Of
Color is a beautiful tactile book.”
—The Pool
“St. Clair serves up a chromatic buffet.”
—Nature
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