Brown is not the official color of poverty

Today I was doing a little investigative reading on colors and ran across a Wikipedia entry that I just don't agree with.

"Brown is the color of dark wood or rich soil. It is a composite color made by combining red, black and yellow. The color is seen widely in nature, in wood, soil, and human hair color, eye color and skin pigmentation. In Europe and the United States, it is the color most often associated with plainness, humility, the rustic, and poverty. It is also, according to public opinion surveys in Europe and the United States, the least favorite color of the public."

They make the claim that brown is a color associated with poverty and that it is one of the least favorite colors in the USA and Europe. I have to disagree with that statement and question how they arrived at such a conclusion.

My first case in point would be stating that a tapa Hawaiian shirt is normally brown in color and brown Tapa cloth is highly prized color amongst collectors.

Explorer Captain Cook sure liked the color brown, in fact he was the first European to collect Tapa cloth and introduce it to the rest of the world. In Tonga, tapa is known as ngatu, and in Tonga it is of great social importance to the islanders, often being given as gifts. Hey, have some poverty brah (said no Tongan ever)

So off to the internet to do some more checking. I checked some home decorating sites as well as performed some simple searches for best colors, favorite colors, etc. and came up with this consensus: "The most popular color in the world is blue. The second favorite colors are red and green, followed by orange, brown and purple." So far, the fine people of the Internet sure don't indicate that the color brown is a disliked color. But you cant believe everything you read on the internet can you?

But wait, pictures don't lie, let's do some additional image searches for "poor people" and "poverty". While I saw a lot of poor people wearing clothing colors such as white, blue, and black, there was very little in the way of brown clothing.

And then I was thinking that chocolate is brown, does that have an association with poverty? Umm nope. What about coffee, its brown in color, is that a sign of poverty?

Even many famous, prestigious universities are built from brown bricks. Not grey or red bricks, but brown, that alone should tell you something about the color brown.

In the end I think the majority consensus on the Internet got it right this time, and Wikipedia is plain wrong. Whether it's colored artificially or naturally, brown is always considered a neutral, yet undeniably popular color. I will always view it as a color associated with nature and our beautiful planet earth and will never look at it as a color symbolic of poverty.

By now your saying to yourself "you didn't mention brown skin color" and your right, I didn't go there because this blog is primarily about product marketing, textiles and clothing trends, not racial issues.