Today, Let’s talk about the color brown. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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You may’ve noticed that some of us have celebrated various colors in this series. But Brown? Few people are apt to call brown a favorite. Maybe we should take a closer look at it.
Think of coffee. Or your favorite dog. Think of chocolate or mahogany. Or prehistoric horses in Lascaux Cave, or Grecian urns. Once we pause to reflect, we see how often brown is the color of excellence. So: What is brown, really?
Well, mix a little black in with orange and you get brown. But it comes in so many flavors – khaki, sienna, chestnut, tan, sable, cocoa, sandy, walnut, sepia ... One runs out of breath.
I like to photograph birds in my back yard. Red cardinals cry out to be seen. But the humble sparrow, basically brown, reveals itself in so many shades. It’s a far more interesting bird.
Of course, the female cardinal has to shield her young. So, she’s brown to blend into her surroundings.
Of course, brown is the color of earth – of soil. I sing its praises in another episode, where I call it by the humbler term “dirt”. Brown soil, after all, is what sustains us. I love seeing rich, freshly planted, brown fields. So full of promise. And brown soil has its own cleansing power. Walt Whitman wrote about the odor of brown compost. He said, “It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor.”
Or, think of so much music that praises dark brown eyes. The Russian song, Ochi Chernye dates back to the Nineteenth Century. But it has remarkable staying power. The words begin, Dark abyss of eyes ... And others pick up that theme. Bob Dylan’s haunting refrain in his song, Dark Eyes ... “all I see are dark eyes”.
And, speaking of songs, there’s Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. She places Brown paper packages tied up with strings amongst all of her favorite things.
A deeper message lurks in the color brown: Creativity means seeing what others do not see. Consider this: Studies show that the face we call beautiful at first glance is the most average one. But then we realize how dull life is when we settle for average. Real beauty, like the color brown, lies beyond that safe, familiar middle.
So, just look at brown all around us – the color whose beauty we overlook. Let us turn our eyes upon what we ignore out of habit ... that one color shaping the way we see all the others.
Think of deer, bread, bamboo, clay, peat, otters, leather, ... Join me in looking around whatever room you and I are in right now. Look at all the brown that we didn’t realize was there – all the brown just waiting for us to savor it!
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way that inventive minds work.
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If you want some fun with the word brown, you might check its listing in the Oxford English dictionary. It gives a sense of how deeply it has burrowed into the English Language. See also: Brown - Wikipedia,
As to my claim that brown ranks as a least-liked color: The Wikipedia article on brown indicates that only 1% of the population will list brown as a favorite color. This Colorlib source claims that 3% choose it as a favorite. And the Wikipedia article about Color Psychology points to its problematic role in most people’s perceptions.
Listen to Dmitri Hvorostovsky singing Ochi Chernye here: Bing Videos or Sophie Milman here. The lyrics appear here.
My episode about soil, which I call dirt: Dirt | The Engines of Our Ingenuity
Click here for Whitman’s poem, This Compost.
Here, someone has made a list of things that are brown, which, to my mind, barely scratches the surface. 200+ Things That Are Brown in Nature (Full List and Photos) | Color Meanings
For more on the idea that we view the average face as most beautiful, see: Averageness - Wikipedia. Also, see e.g.: Langlois, J. H., Roggman, L. A., & Musselman, L. (1994). What is average and what is not average about attractive faces? Psychological Science, 5(4), 214–220.
My thanks to Jacinta Carlson for her valuable suggestions.
All images here are my own photos.
This episode first aired on July 7, 2025