‘Blue and green should never be seen’ & other colour sayings

Rules are made to be broken, right?

I often think this when I hear sayings that have effectively become directives, especially those about colours.

There are loads of them:

  • Brown and blue will never do
  • Red and yellow catch a fellow
  • Pink and green fit for a queen
  • There are the more commonly known ones involving both green mixed with either blue or red (‘Blue and green should never be seen, except with something in between’ and ‘Red and green should never be seen, except upon an Irish Queen’).

I often wonder whether the words were first uttered way back when by some clever wordsmith who made a rhyme for the fun of it, only to watch it being embraced as a colour rule to live by.

Time and again we see these colours working brilliantly together (I’m rather liking the blues and green in conversation in this pic), proving that rebelling against colour hearsay most definitely has a place in our world.

Martha, The Colour File x

Written April 2019, updated June 2022

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