What Does the Color White Symbolize? (Meanings of the Color White)

Key Takeaways

• White is often associated with purity, innocence, and cleanliness.
• In different cultures, white can mean purity or death and sadness.
• White is used in design to make spaces feel larger and brighter.

Are you all white, err—alright? If you are familiar with color psychology, you likely aren’t surprised to know that the color white has a number of meanings and associations. These may, however, vary depending on the individual and the culture in which they live. Some of the main associations often connected to the color white include purity, innocence, cleanliness, blankness, coldness, emptiness, simplicity, and minimalism.

Let’s dig deeper into the meaning of the color white in psychology and spirituality as well as some of the positive and negative associations of this color.

Illustration by Cindy Chung, Verywell

Psychological Characteristics of the Color White

According to color psychology, these are the characteristics of white:

• White represents purity or innocence. While a bride wearing white was often thought to convey the bride’s virginity, blue was once a traditional color worn by brides to symbolize purity.
• White is bright and can create a sense of space or add highlights. Designers often use the color white to make rooms seem larger and more spacious.
• White is also described as cold, bland, and sterile. Rooms painted completely white can seem spacious but empty and unfriendly. Hospitals and hospital workers use white sheets, towels, and walls to create a sense of sterility.
• The color white can also convey a sense of austerity and minimalism. Some may find this calming or refreshing, while others may find it stark or bland.

Spiritual Meaning of the Color White

Many faiths and sacred texts use the color white in reference to:

• Holiness (perfect, flawless)
• Wisdom (associated with white hair)
• Purity (to be purified and made white)
• Religious commitment (wearing white for a dedication ceremony or baptism)
• Peace, anointing, new beginnings (the white dove)
• Prophecy (the white horse)
• Judgment (great white throne judgment)
• Healing (white can be viewed as the color of healing)
• Power (contains all other colors on the light spectrum, out of which comes the rainbow)
• Spiritual beings (angels are often pictured as wearing bright white robes)
• Eternity (going toward the white light when you die)

Positive and Negative Meanings of the Color White

Because color meanings vary from one person to the next, the color white can have both positive and negative meanings.

Some of the positive meanings that white can convey include delicate, pure, calm, bright, fresh, clean, and simple. It may invoke thoughts of white delicate flowers, bright sunny days, fresh air, and a clear mind. The color white is often portrayed as a blank slate, symbolizing a new beginning or a fresh start. And let’s not forget the blushing bride wearing her white gown, and the crowd releases white doves to celebrate the newly married couple.

On the negative side, white can seem stark, cold, and isolated. Others perceive it to be unfriendly, empty, barren, and even mournful. Consider how a large, white, empty room might seem boring, bland, and uninviting.

Meanings of the Color White

The meaning of the color white often depends upon the context. The color is often used in interior design, marketing, and fashion, where it can be utilized in different ways to evoke certain moods or have specific effects.

Feng Shui

White is considered a powerful color in feng shui, a system of arranging your environment to create harmony. Colors are linked to certain feng shui elements and in the case of white, the element it expresses is metal.

Wood and glass accents go extraordinarily well with white, as do bits of black to balance it out. White is also great for kitchens, living rooms, bathrooms, and bedrooms and white flowers in white pots are an economical way to incorporate white into your environment.

Marketing

In marketing and branding, white is used to convey a feeling of safety, purity, freshness, and cleanliness, as well as to create contrast. Some famous brands that use a great deal of white in their logos and marketing are Michelin, Gap, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Lego, Volkswagen, Starbucks, Fisher-Price, Levi’s, and Ford.

Design

In design fields, white is often used to highlight or act as a neutral background to let other colors, objects, or textures take the spotlight. It is also a popular color in minimalistic designs, particularly when used with various other shades of white or other light neutrals such as gray, beige, or taupe.

Fashion

In fashion, the color white is often used to evoke a sense of purity, innocence, freshness, or cleanliness. Because white reflects light, it is often worn in the summer months to help stay cool. However, it also has a reputation for getting dirty or stained quickly, which means it isn’t ideal in situations where a person will be spending time being active or engaging in physical labor.

Color Associations Are Not Universal

One thing to remember is that such color associations are not necessarily universal. Colors can have different meanings, symbolism, and associations in other cultures.

In Western cultures, the color white is often associated with weddings, hospitals, and angels and is often used to convey a sense of purity, cleanliness, and peacefulness.

In many Eastern cultures, however, white is symbolically linked to death and sadness. It’s often a color used in funerals and other mourning rituals, which is in contrast to Western cultures that prefer black.

What White Says About Your Personality

One study on adults’ color preferences showed that out of 18 total colors, including no preference, white only ranked 15th as the overall favorite color. It fared a little better when the same adults were asked to rank their favorite color in clothing, coming in at 10th.

When asked to choose their favorite colors for the physical environment, white was overwhelmingly the number one favorite for all the listed rooms: living rooms, bedrooms, offices, and meeting rooms.

White was also ranked number one for evoking moods of quietness and concentration.

If white is your favorite color, it might mean that you have a preference for colors that evoke a sense of calmness or simplicity. Or, it may simply mean that you have formed positive associations with the color in the past.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What defines white color?

  White is defined as the lightest color and is achromatic, meaning that it has no hue. It is the opposite of the color black and can be found in objects such as milk and snow. It has a variety of associations, including coldness, sterility, and innocence.

• What color is white?

  Technically, white, like black, is an achromatic color, or a shade that is used to augment other colors. However, some people consider white to be the color of colors because it is a combination of every wavelength in the visible light spectrum. Wavelength and hue are different. Think about it, you cannot combine all paint colors together to create white paint.

• What 3 colors create white?

  In the realm of electromagnetic wavelenths, white is a combination of red, green, and blue light.

• Why is white a powerful color?

  White has a variety of symbolic meanings, including its association with purity, freshness, and sterility. Visually, it can often be used to convey a sense of simplicity or cleanliness, or can be used along with darker colors to create a sense of contrast.

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

1. Birren, Faber. Color Psychology And Color Therapy; A Factual Study Of The Influence of Color On Human Life. Hauraki Publishing, 2016.

2. Zhen Chong K, Bahauddin A. Feng shui: The shape of five elements of Low Ti Kok mansion. Planning Malaysia. 2017;15(1):226. doi:10.21837/pm.v15i1.226

3. Cohn M, Bromell M. The 50 Most Iconic Brand Logos of All Time. Complex.

4. Bakker I, van der Voordt T, Vink P, de Boon J, Bazley C. Color preferences for different topics in connection to personal characteristics. Color Research and Application. 2015;40(1):62–71. doi:10.1002/col.21845

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the “Everything Psychology Book.”

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