A Lay Scientist Meditates on the Erotic Power of the Color Red

Cherries for their anthocyanins, pomegranates for their antioxidants, and the juice of a bottle of Barolo for a spurt of resveratrol:  We’re bombarded with the good news that a cornucopia of trendy tongue-twisters will save us from heart disease and horrid digestive cancers.

O, wouldn’t it be nice.  And if the heart and gut are happy, can the bottom bits be far behind?

To say I’m not a scientist is an understatement.  But I know a thing or two about red.  Back in the early 90s, before resveratrol tripped over every sideways tongue, I wrote a book on that certain color, A Passion for Red, in partnership with Ellen Stern.  Ellen’s not a scientist, either, but she’s a meticulous researcher.  And while we don’t exactly expect a Nobel, I can’t help observing that dynamite is traditionally wrapped in red paper. And why do I bother you with that factoid?  Because Ellen and I learned that the redness of red is often the thing that matters.

What this has to do with libido may be right in front of your eyes.  The blushing cheek, the rosy nipple, the empurpled penis not only give evidence of desire, they also excite it. Because gazing on red is an act with happy consequences—for people, if not for bulls.

Do we see colors because they’re waves or because they’re particles? Physicists debate.  It would be nice to know the truth.  Wave or particle, this we do know: red enters into our body through the eye, and something happens.  Perhaps you’ve asked yourself: Robutussin, where did you get that red? Is it just the bright boys in marketing deciding that red outsells other colors?  Well, no.  In olden days, folks widely believed that looking on the color red stimulated the circulation and therefore led to healing. That may not yet be science but it doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Valentine’s Day is just around a couple of corners, and as Christmas trees pile up at curbside, magazine covers will feature beets on the half shell and cherry berry pies.  While editors knock themselves out trying to find a fresh news peg, some of us take comfort that here is a story as old as our earliest myths.

Coincidence that Persephone nibbled on a pomegranate while captive in the underworld?  I think not.  If she’d eaten a big old Greek salad, a delicious mingling of flavors and textures but seriously lacking red, I bet you dollars to donuts she would have been allowed to return to her mother all twelve months of the year.  But she sucked the sweet and sour juicy flesh of just six red arils—the pulp-covered seeds that number 840 in each and every pomegranate—and so it was a different story.  Go back to Ovid if you doubt me, or check out the Stockholm syndrome, or gaze on and suck on some pomegranate seeds and let the redness get to you.  It’s not how they tell it to children, but children know anyway.  Persephone came to desire the dark-bearded god who stole her away from her mother, who saved her from being a year-round virgin, heaven help her.

I’ve always thought it was a pomegranate in Eden (pomegranate means seeded apple); whatever kind of apple it was, it was red.  And you know what it did.  Wherever there’s a culture, a particular slant on desire, there’s red. Years ago, when I had a magazine assignment to invent a tantric ceremony for yuppies (my apologies to true adepts), I stressed the importance of red: red silk robes, red cushions, red candles, and gorgeous, wide-open red tulips.  A blood orange juice mimosa, but of course.  I didn’t know what I was talking about, and yet I got it right.  Looking at red heated the room and invited the departure from self that begins the tantric adventure.  I am the earth and you are the sun. Get out of the way, stop trying, don’t talk, don’t move, and I’ll open like a tulip, you’ll burn as brightly as the candle.

I was a red diaper baby and am a proud progressive today.  Can someone explain to me why Republican states are red and Democrats are blue?  Wikipedia says Tim Russert chose the palette in 2000 but doesn’t tell us why.  Blue bedrooms are conjectured to promote a chilly bedtime.  I’ve long worried that Republicans secretly have better sex lives than Democrats, even though when in legislative mode they’re determined to assure that no one but themselves has sex, at least not with government funding.

In the same mode of mind, I worry that older women eschew the wearing of red on the theory that it makes them look washed out or as if they’re wearing their daughter’s clothing.  I just bought a pair of red cashmere gloves, and my hands never felt warmer or more supple.  A red sweater is next on my list. Hmmm—maybe his and hers.

Do you have a deck of playing cards at hand?  Pull out the queen of hearts and the queen of clubs and put your palm flat down on each one.  Notice how much more warmth to the queen of hearts? Now shuffle the deck.  With your eyes tightly closed, deal out two cards at a time face up.  Two red, two black, red on right and black on the life, or the other way around?  Let your palm read the heat or lack thereof. You may be surprised at how often you get it right.  Go through the deck a few times, and you may even be able to feel the difference in the low-number cards (less ink) and the high ones.

Do it with a lover, while sipping an old Barolo, and wonderful things may happen in the hearts, with other places quickly following suite.

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Many years ago I heard that Stravinsky and Auden used to make all red and all white dinners for each other.  I never saw a menu, but I could imagine the visual punch, the connection between eye and appetite.  I developed an obsession with monochromatic cookery that never went away.  I fondly remember my first husband wearing a white sheet toga-style to an all white dinner: vichyssoise, scallops, the palest endives, and rice pudding.  When an actress friend played a countess on The Days of Our Lives, I honored her glam wardrobe by preparing an all-black lunch for guests at a private screening: caviar on Russian bread, squid ink linguini with black beans (oddly, it worked), licorice ice cream.  Above all other colors, I love cooking red—more properly, the reds.  My final project at culinary school was a red dinner: a pinkish country pate with plum shallot chutney and twirls of scarlet-hearted radishes; rare hanger steak with Cabernet sauce and oven-fried beet chips; a salad of oak leaf and other red lettuces; and a sweet course of peppermint pink meringue swans, tiny linzer hearts, and miniature strawberry tarts.  O, where is a scientific study to prove that such a menu helps promote a long and lubricious life?  Dear doctors, please consider that red rhymes with bed….     #