Is it everywhere or nowhere?
A YouGov poll in 2015 claimed that blue was the world's favourite colour, and we see it everywhere in the world's favourite place…social media. Not to mention messaging apps, email - it's truly the colour of digital connection.
It's even described by musician Regina Spektor as 'the most human colour'
The lyrics go “blue lips, blue veins; blue, the colour of our planet from far far away."
So I wanted to take a tour around our relationship to blue - not only the intrinsic qualities of blue but things that happen to be blue, that we happen to call blue.
There are hardly any blue flowers or fruits, and of the earth's 64,000 vertebrates only two have blue pigment. And where blue is present, it too is constantly in the process of vanishing. These blue morpho butterflies aren't really blue, it's just light refraction! And the sky isn't really blue, nor is the sea - that's just how we perceive their colour.
Many ancient civilisations had no word for blue, like how Homer's Odyssey famously described a "wine-dark sea". We might associate blue with clarity, like clear blue skies - but clearly clear blue is a lie, a conspiracy peddled by butterflies - there's nothing clear about blue at all.
In the comedy special Nanette, Hannah Gadsby draws attention to the many conflicting faces of blue: she said
"… it really is full of contradiction.
Blue is a cold colour, it's on the cold end of the spectrum.
But the hottest part of the flame… blue.
If you're feeling blue, you're sad.
But optimism: blue skies ahead.
A blueprint is a plan but if something happens that's not on the plan, where does that come from? Out of the blue."
So if there's any defining quality of blue, it's confusion.
It's then in this lack of meaning, this infinite possibility, that blue can also begin to represent the creation of meaning.
But I don't think revealing that these connections are more forged than innate invalidates them. Paul Cézanne said that "blue gives other colours their vibration." and Bernard, a fellow artist added that: "in nature, it is always found over and around objects and they merge into it the more they draw away…"
Blue connects us over skies, seas… Twitter - or as Derek Jarman put it: "Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits." And this is maybe what makes it the most human colour. It represents not only our physical bodies but also our desire to push beyond these limits, to even see our planet from far far away. Blue is our search for meaning, our lack of meaning, and the meaning we create. And while it doesn't organically appear in nature, it does appear in us, in how we perceive the world - the sky, the sea, what leads us to call the place we inhabit the 'blue' planet.