Experimenters later claimed that holding a pink card in front of a weight lifter resulted in an inability to lift heavy weights (a fact never proven). Perhaps the most interesting experiment associated with the use of pink occurred in the mid 1990s and entailed the practice of painting visiting sports teams’ locker rooms a soft shade of peach. The Western Athletic Conference (WAC) later ruled that a visiting team’s locker room must be painted the same colour as the home team’s, whatever that colour might be.*
True science
Colour is a property of light, which consists of many different electromagnetic energy waves. When light falls on the photoreceptor cells of the retina, it is converted into electric impulses, which travel to the brain and trigger the release of hormones. (Absence of light also triggers hormone release—for example the sleep hormone, melatonin—which is secreted when the retina senses darkness.) Proponents of colour therapy reason that if light, and the absence of light, have such profound effects on well being, then the individual colours of the light spectrum may well play a significant role.
*Honolulu Star Bulletin, October 24, 1999