There’s something so intimate about reading a stranger’s unsent texts to their first loves, especially in the sheer volume that Rora Blue’s The Unsent Project provides.
A collection of over 40,000 unsent text messages submitted anonymously from people all over the world, Blue started the project in 2015 to figure out what color people see love in. Texts are displayed on the same color the submitter associates with their first love.
While Blue receives between 50 to 100 submissions every day on the project’s website, some submissions are chosen for social media and collages. Her only criteria is that the submission “makes her stop and read it twice,” according to an interview on Framebridge.
Blue chose to connect her art so personally with color because she was curious if experiencing color with distinctive emotions was part of a wider human experience. In asking her submitters to assign colors to their first loves, Blue observed a pattern of messages in a certain color evoking a similar emotional tone.
According to University of California professor emeritus Steve Palmer, “cross-culturally, the most highly favored color is very saturated blue.” This is because this specific shade of blue is associated with almost all positive things — “a deep, clean lake, a clear sky or a beautiful sapphire gemstone.”
Aside from saturated blue as an outlier, preferences, and associations for color vary greatly personally and are strongly influenced by culture and personal experience. Additionally, people tend to like colors associated with objects they love or consider to be “good things.”
Given the psychology behind our views of color, it’s not surprising that Rora Blue’s The Unsent Project, which features color so prominently, creates a more visceral reaction as we respond to both the contents of the message as well as their color.
For maximum emotions, try reading through the red submissions.
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