What's your favorite color?

Colors become an important part of our individual lives as soon as early childhood. Do you remember your favorite color when you were 5 years old? Is it the same today? 

Maureen Healy, a leader in the field of children's emotional health and author of The Emotionally Healthy Child says that “colors can be symbolic or representational — for example, the heart represents love and is most closely aligned to pink and green. So a love-focused child may only want to wear her pink princess dress during kindergarten, but then in third grade when she’s more into unicorns, fairies, and mystical objects she changed her favorite color to purple.” (Full article)

At StartBox we utilize three colors in our system: Lavender, Rose and Gray. It’s used in our mobile app, our product packaging and throughout our education materials. It’s not really because these colors are our favorites. But they do mean something. We’ll come back to why in a minute. 

In Nature, color is frequently used as a signaling system. It is the first thing we register when we are assessing anything. A very simple example is our reaction to a fly in our home: if it is black or navy blue, we will probably find it a minor irritation; but if it has yellow stripes our reaction will be different - most of us will recoil. The same instinct tells us when food is unsafe to eat, and throughout the animal kingdom color is widely used to attract a mate.

StartBox uses color as a signaling system too. We’re associating a color to the side or laterality of a procedure; and they happen to start with the same letter... 
Lavender for LEFT, 
Rose for RIGHT, and 
Neutral GRAY for No laterality. OK, we had to stretch the first letter association a bit on that last one...

In the world of surgical procedures, wrong laterality is the most frequent type of wrong site surgery adding up to over 70% of errors. The StartBox System can help a doctor or nurse more quickly and subconsciously recognize the laterality of a procedure through the coloring signal. It’s part of a comprehensive system designed to eliminate wrong site surgeries and capture near misses through a real-time, data-driven approach.

So...what’s your favorite color?