Samantha hillman on the child-like wonder inspired by colour.

Every place has its colour. New York is brown. London is greige. Stockholm is peachy and apricot. Madrid genuflects toward yellower hues, and Paris is the inside of an oyster: the grey, the pearl, the flecks of aquamarine. Chefchaouen is blue. Berlin is red. Santorini is whiter than marble. 

But Isla Mujeres is all of the colours, all at once. You can see it from the sky, grassy and Crayola speckled, a salt rim of sand, stretched across a patch of the Caribbean sea so infuriatingly blue it seems chlorinated. Mujeres is sweetness and heat and light. There’s melony pink villas with seafoam doors, tangly powerlines, mangoes for sale. Bougainvillea-ensconced shops painted with not just the “cool” colours (the emeralds, the navys, the smoky golds we’ve come to associate with tropical B&Bs), but every damn shade under the sun. Ones that aren’t supposed to match. Splashes of lime green against an otherwise soothing lilac. Apricot houses with turquoise trim. Yellow doors, red windows. Fluorescent tones with pastel ones. Flashes of metallic. All swirled together, fanned by palms and slabbed with terracotta. 

A cursory google search suggests these kaleidoscopic streetscapes have something to do with religion. A way of surrendering to the will of God, or fate, or something. Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps the buildings are simply bathed in richer light, the sort that inspires a stripey roof or marigold balcony (“How lovely yellow is!” Said Van Gough “it stands for the sun”). All I know is that it feels like being a kid again. 

When we are little, colour makes us happy. We feel and we taste and we sing in colour instead of trying to intellectualize it. We want (/need!) rainbow leggings and glittery shoes and bubblegum bedroom walls. Not because we’re aiming for any particular look, but because we feel that shit in our soul. Perhaps our first taste of existential despair is the suspicion that other people don’t see colour as we do. Like how an apple is red but is YOUR red, the same as MY red?! etcetera. “But how do you KNOW when you aren’t inside my eyes?”  I’d howl to my mum, whose distracted answers did nothing to chill me out, but who was probably relieved that the same kid who lodged a pebble up her nose was starting to think things through a bit. 

Adults have a lot of rules about colour. When we should use them, what they mean. We match, code and mood board them, paint inside the lines with careful restraint. Maybe that’s what makes places like Mujeres even more fun. If everything was peaches and cream then you wouldn’t know what peaches and cream tastes like, and we couldn’t appreciate Mujeres’ rainbow if it weren’t for all the greige.