The first Friday in June is traditionally Migraine Awareness Day in Australia. That’s today! I can’t, however, bring myself to write “Happy Migraine Day” – instead, I thought I’d write a post about the color purple.
Everywhere I looked on the fundraising sites, it was purple, purple, purple.
The purple ribbon has long been used as a sign of support for several different chronic illnesses, including migraine.
And it got me thinking… what do I know about purple?
I took a brief walk down memory lane to get myself started…
Nearly a year ago (!?!) I wrote an extended post of a book review about “Healing with Color“. To quote myself:
“Violet is the shortest wavelength, closest to the UV end of the light spectrum. Its royal associations tend to make it a regal, even wealthy color, that can help improve self-respect and dignity. It is also apparently a combination of red (male) and blue (female) and therefore balances energies. [Although the contemporary West might reverse those color assignments?]”
In my post about Make a Healing Mandala, I also noted that purple is the color of the crown chakra, symbolized by a thousand-petaled lotus hovering above your head, suggesting extreme spiritualty.
Flash back to my past: when I was working as a designer / architect, we often used Pantone as a color regulating source (they use numbers that relate to how much red-blue-yellow is in a color, rather than names, so you can match the color exactly across production techniques). One of the fun things they’ve been doing for a few decades now is the Pantone Color of the Year; it is designed to tap into the mood of the moment and often dictates trends for the year ahead. Interestingly, purple figures three times this century:
[Image source: screen shots off google search]
When I went through the free Pexels pictures to find an image to put at the top of this post, there were dozens of responses under the word search “purple” – mostly of flowers and starry night skies. Similarly, when I did a search on my PowerPoint presentation maker, so many options came up that I was able to make a mini-mood board out of them:
[Image source: PowerPoint stock images]
Again, flowers and night skies kept popping up, as well as more peripheral purples such as eggplants and a soap-bubble-sheen. Overall, it’s not hard to get a big sigh of relief looking at all this purple goodness!
When I went looking for more information, VeryWellMind.com noted that the color purple has a variety of meanings: “including wisdom, creativity, royalty, power, ambition, and luxury. It can also represent magic, extravagance, peace, pride, independence, and wealth.”
[Image source: Purple: Color Meaning, Associations, and Effects]
They then add “if purple is your favorite color, it might signify that you have an artistic, thoughtful, and intuitive side” … nice!
According to ColorMeangings.com, we associate purple with both regal royalty but also something more ephemeral, spiritual, even other-worldy.
One of the reasons, as they note, is the rarity of purple (not just in nature, but also in manufacturing). In Europe, to gain the smallest amount of purple dye, literally 1000s of shellfish had to be crushed in the ancient era, so a purple hem was a big investment, let alone a whole garment made in purple. Meanwhile in China, purple came from a plant that was more giving than a bazillion mollusks, but apparently not very stable, and the color was quick to fade off fabric.
According to the website, it was a happy-accident in 1856 that gave us the faux-fabric-dye we know today. A chemist named William Henry Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine at school when he unexpectedly created a new dye called “mauveine” – what we now think of as MAUVE.
Here’s cheers to saving those sea shells from extinction!
Over and over, purple gives me a sense of gentle healing; not so much royalty as rarity… and definitely a hint of the divine.
For everyone who is wearing a purple ribbon today for migraine awareness – I see you, I am you – hang in there, we got this!
To everyone else, thank you as always for the support that you show us, and know that I’m sending love if you’re a chronic pain warrior of a different sort, or a carer to people like us!
Take care taking care, purply, Linda xx
PS – this time last year, I created a post called Meet the Burples, which was part of a fundraising initiative for Migraine Australia. To help out, I generated a quick photo montage of me with a Burple:
PPS – here’s the video of the rockstar Prince whose song “Purple Rain” made me think of the title of this post (I confess I’ve never really understood the whole hype around it… but it is now stuck in my head for the rest of the day, so I thought I’d share the earworm with you!)
[Source: https://youtu.be/_u6_nKTYI58]
PPPS – One of the most harrowing books I have EVER read is Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” (1982) which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983. The book (and the movie that followed in 1985) is incredibly powerful, but I’m reluctant to recommend it, as the trauma and abuse is unrelenting and the opposite of the sense of safety I’m trying to encourage here.
PPPPS – if you’re curious about what Pantone’s color of the year is for 2025, it’s the delicious “Mocha Mousse” which is designed for “Capturing a Global Mood of Connection, Comfort, and Harmony” – here’s to all of us leaning into that (…or eating it!)
[Image source: Pantone Colour of the Year 2025]
PPPPPS – (bad habit sorry – my mind is running wild/wide today!) – The Color Meanings website has a color personality test you can take (here – which will take you off my blog and into the ether) – note – to release the results you have to give them an email account… luckily I have one I use for just this sort of correspondence, so I can quickly ignore / delete emails that aren’t core to my day to day existence… as soon as I had given them the data they craved, I was advised that this is me: “Blue color personalities are calm, introspective, and rational individuals. They seek harmony in their relationships and surroundings. To Blues, few things are as important as achieving peace — both in their environments and within themselves. That might make it sound like every blue personality is a loner. However, their strong communication skills and tendency to encourage other people mean that blue color personalities often make great leaders.”
Bye for now, in purple & blue, Linda xx
The Mindful Migraine 
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