Why is mint green? Except when it’s peppermint, and thus red? Why is cinnamon usually red, and sometimes brown, but never yellow? Why is bubblegum that garish pink? How long have we had associations between certain flavors and the correct or proper colors for them? It can’t have predated safe inexpensive food coloring, and it’s not really possible for *that *to be more than a century old. So who invented these things?
Assuming this isn’t a whoosh.
Here’s what mint looks like
This is what ground cinnamon looks like
And gum is pink because that color is really not taken up by association with any kind of specific fruit 
(Ok I made that one up)
Bubble gum is pink by tradition. It was apparently invented by Walter Diemer, an accountant with Fleer; the only food coloring the factory had at the time was pink, so that’s what they used. Subsequent gum manufacturers simply followed suit.
No whoosh. There doesn’t have to be any relation between those things; mint ice cream would be artificially colored, because mint oils should be colorless, hypothetically. So is almond, but almond ice cream can be green as well. And not all mint is green, because if someone hands you a stick of gum, and you unwrap it to find that it’s blue, you know it’s mint as well. Why on earth would that be blue? How long has it been blue? In short, how long have we been artificially coloring foods?
Th color-flavor association is strong.
We used to do an experiment in some workshops I taught at where people were fed a cup of red-colored Jello. They all reported the flavor as cherry. If they closed their eyes however, they realized that it was orange-flavored Jello with lots of red food coloring.
No one ever wanted to try the black Jello. That was the cherry-flavored one.
Cinnamon looks like ‘Forbidden’.
Seriously though, the OP isn’t necessarily asking why the obvious connections are made, such as yellow for lemon and green for mint, but why some less obvious connections are made, such as red for peppermint. The answer to that specifically 'prolly has something to do with the peppermint flower being red.
I suspect in general the answer is complicated, being partially what we see in nature, part tradition of manufacturing, and part cultural flavor expectations, such as red=hot, and blue=cool, etc. For the connections that seem completely out there I’d bet you can trace them to some deliberate marketing angle or some manufacturing anomaly like that mentioned by Q.E.D. I’ll be following this thread to see if any psychologists or neurologists check in with better explanations.
Just for the record, in the UK peppermint is usually white. I don’t think I’ve ever had a red mint. Spearmint sweets are usually green.
I have never seen any red peppermint anything. Peppermint and spearmint are green. Wintermint is either green or cyan-ish (winterish blue + mint green) but I don’t even know what the hell wintermint actually is. Red is cinnamon because cinnamon is red.
If you hand me a stick of blue gum, I’m going to assume it’s blueberry.
If you hand me a stick of white gum with cyan crystals I’m going to assume it’s some sort of mint because I associate crystals with mint (commercials? dunno why)
I just went through my fridge and cupboard and I can’t find a single counterexample of artificially colored anything that isn’t dyed close to what color you would expect it to be in nature. Raspberry jello is pink. Peach yogurt has… chunks of peach colored peach inside (I think it’s real peach, so maybe it doesn’t count). All the flavors of Popsicles match up their color – apple is green, grape is purple, orange is … orange.
Are you guys sure you’re not smoking crack (usually off-white)? I mean the closest thing I can find is that my package of Earl Grey is bluish grey and not orange like you would expect, but that’s packaging not food dye.
I think we expect things to taste like similarly colored and textured things that are found in nature. I mean that’s why color is important – cherry flavored jello that was aquamarine with a crunchy grit would just not taste right. But I just don’t think it’s arbitrary, the color is matched to what it tastes like. The only time random food dyes are used is when the intended taste is something that’s not supposed to taste like anything found in nature!
All I can say is fuck that stupid green ketchup Heines came out with a few years ago. I don’t care if they claim it tastes the same (and I’m sure, objectively it does), but I just couldn’t get past it psychologically. It just looked wrong, and tasted wrong as a result.
Okay, why should apple popsicles be green?
In nature apples have skins in various colours, green red yellow, brown. Thew flesh is white. Sometimes a hint of green, sometimes a hint of yellow, but basically white.
Apple juice is brown. I’d expect a naturally colured and flavoured lolly to be brown. Wouldn’t you?
It’s simply for clarity. Green apples, brown chocolate. Hence “blue raspberry”.
slight hijack…
Color is a strong motivator for all kinds of emotional responses. I read an article several years ago about a consumer test of liquid dishwashing soap. Identical bottles of hand dishwashing liquid were given to several testers and the insinuation was that they were different brands to be tested for quality. The red soap was overwhelmingly considered too harsh, the blue one didn’t clean very well, and the green one was juuuuusst right.
Candy canes aren’t red, they’re white with red stripes. I’ve sucked on enough of them as a kid to know the red stripes don’t go all the way though them. Aside from those red-and-white mints you often find in restaurants, all other peppermint-flavored candies I can think of (such as Lifesavers and Tic Tacs) are all white.
Just click on the link in the address bar and have it reload.
Starlight Mints and their generic counterparts are the most popular and prevalent mints in the US, along with candy canes. There is definitely an association with the color red and peppermint flavor. Even British mints like Altoids, while they are white, come in a red tin. Notice the red flower on the drawing of the mint plant.
GIS peppermint ice cream, peppermint candy, peppermints, peppermint cake - the predominant color is overwhelmingly red - most people seem to make this connection. Though white is also a strongly associated color for peppermints.
Oddly enough when it comes to peppermint gum the color choice seems to change to blue.
You know, I sucked on a lot of candy canes in my life, and not until now did it occur to me the flavor was peppermint. :smack: Stupid color.
Maybe your tongue is color blind, or it just needs glasses?
CMC fnord!
For as long as I can remember certain colours have pretty well always been associated with certain flavours:
Red: Cinnamon or cherry (usually a darker red for cinnamon if there could be confusion within the same brand)
Blue: Peppermint (on the packaging; white for the gum or candy itself)
Cyan: Wintergreen (or wintermint)
Green: Spearmint (or green and white)
Purple: Grape
Orange: Orange
Yellow: Lemon
And so on.
Often some colours are reused if they are packaged within a particular context. A bag or package of something expected to be assorted fruit flavours will use red for cherry, blue for raspberry, green for apple, etc.
Most of the time things are associated with a particular colour because that’s the colour of the thing it’s supposed to taste like. Sometimes it is an association of perceived temperature: White or blue for cool/minty, red for hot/spicy. Other times (as with bubble gum) it’s just because it’s a colour not associated with something else.
I think that’s the reason for raspberry becoming associated with blue. Cherry and strawberry are more popular fruit flavors and red was overused.