Colour Turn

Beyond the Spectrum: Unveiling the Uncharted Influence of Ultraviolet Colour Naratives in Contemporary Cinema

Jarvis Tyrell Curry — 2026-02-28

This study explores the innovative use of ultraviolet (UV) colours in modern filmmaking. Traditional colour schemes have long been pivotal in cinematic storytelling, yet UV hues remain an underexplored frontier. This research examines the implicit meanings and effects of UV colours on audience perception and engagement, highlighting their potential to alter narrative comprehension and thematic interpretation. The study delves into the technical processes of capturing UV colours, involving specialised equipment and techniques, and emphasizes the importance of safety measures due to the harmful effects of prolonged UV exposure. It also provides a theoretical framework, linking UV colour usage to psychological and emotional impacts, drawing on colour psychology and photobiology research. Through detailed analysis of films such as Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void, and Alex Garland's Annihilation, this paper illustrates how UV colours can enhance surreal and hallucinogenic atmospheres, symbolising profound themes and evoking complex emotional responses. The methodology includes qualitative case studies of these films, examining their visual and thematic elements. The findings suggest that UV colours in film significantly impact viewer emotions and cognition, creating unique atmospheres that enhance storytelling and audience engagement. The paper also discusses practical applications of UV light beyond cinema, in fields such as art, forensics, and medicine. This research underscores the need for further technological advancements, artistic experimentation, and empirical studies to fully harness the capabilities of UV light in film production, offering filmmakers a novel tool for creating immersive and emotionally resonant cinematic experiences.

Keywords: Ultraviolet Colors, Hues, Visual Effects, Psychological Impact, Cinematic Narrative.

Personal Colour between Perceptual Space and Social Practice

Akihiro Kawase — 2026-02-28

Personal colour analysis has become a pervasive guide to self-presentation in East Asian beauty cultures, yet its authority rests on a largely qualitative diagnostic practice whose relation to colourimetric structure remains unclear. This study investigates how far contemporary personal colour, as practised by social media influencers, can be modelled within a perceptually uniform colour space. We compiled a dataset of lipstick products from five Japanese Instagram influencers who routinely classify cosmetics into personal colour categories. For each product, the representative colour sample from the manufacturer’s website was converted from sRGB to CIE L*a*b* coordinates and linked to two kinds of label: yellow-base versus blue-base, and the four seasonal types (spring, summer, autumn, winter). Gradient-boosted decision tree classifiers (XGBoost) were trained to predict these labels from L*, a* and b*. The yellow/blue task achieved an accuracy of .82 and macro F1-score of .81, with feature importance dominated by the b* (yellow-blue) component. By contrast, the seasonal task reached only .65 accuracy and .64 macro F1, with lightness L* emerging as the most informative feature and extensive overlap between all four seasons in the a*-b* plane. These findings suggest that influencer practice tracks a perceptually meaningful yellow-blue dimension, while seasonal categories operate as looser narrative constructs that combine lightness and hue in culturally elaborated ways. The study thus positions personal colour as a hybrid formation in which colour-scientific regularities underpin, but do not fully determine, popular regimes of aesthetic classification.

Keywords: Personal Colour, CIE L*a*b*, Statistical Analysis, Machine Learning

Wieland, Mascha. 2022. Entangled with Colour: New Materialist Explorations in English Colour Writing, Tübingen University Press

Elena Mucciarelli — 2026-02-28

Abstract not applicable.