(or colour-to-taste synesthesia)
It could be considered a type of
visual-gustatory or conceptual-gustatory synesthesia
This type of synesthesia appears to be uncommon. It can exist alone or together with colour-to-smell synesthesia, as people with this latter type often say that seeing colours causes them to perceive both olfactory and gustatory concurrents and it is sometimes even difficult for them to distinguish whether what they are perceiving is a taste or a smell. In the cases reported, the taste concurrent is produced when the person perceives the colour visually, although presumably in many cases it is enough for the synesthete to merely think about the colour in question or perhaps hear someone say its name, as colours are clearly a conceptual inducer.
Go to the page on colour-to-smell synesthesia“Red is not cherry. Each color has a unique identificative taste, but the tastes don’t really correspond to "real life" tastes. Its hard to explain how blue tastes, it just tastes like blue!
Different
shades all have different tastes, and it can vary greatly. It's all the same
general taste, like blue is always sweet, but the kind of sweet changes from
shade to shade.”
“Brown.
Rich, moist, a very deep flavor, salty and slightly bitter with a creamy
texture. It’s a very specific brown that illicits that taste. Hard to describe.
Purple.
Velvety, overly sweet with a touch of sour and very very rich.”
Not all
colors, but many. It’s not overwhelming really because I’m used to it.
“I taste
and smell colors. Taste is around eyes but when strong enough it hits the back
of my tongue/throat. Aroma is smelled with my physical nose when I breathe air
with it.”
“I can
taste colours, yet only when I think about it, otherwise I don't really notice
it.
When you
look at a colour, you percieve it visually as a colour (i.e. red, green, blue).
But you also view it as a taste. Most colours taste like things that you can't
really relate to. (However, black specifically has a bland, wholesome taste to
it).”
More cases / readers' comments: read all the comments on
this article here
(See the comments received in 2026 below, or follow the above link for access to all the reader comments describing their own experiences: it makes interesting reading)
This page last updated: 16 June 2024
I always assumed this was something everyone has? Until I seen someone mention the colour-words thing.
ReplyDeleteFor me it’s kind of like um, greens are kind of chalky? The darker the colour the chalkier it gets, and there’s a really subtle flavour, I don’t know what it is but it’s there? And white is kind of citrusy but if it were crunchy. Some colours are thick and have a hops type of smell, very unpleasant, enough to make me pull a face like I just put earwax in my mouth or something. Yellows are fizzy, kind of spiky, slightly bitter… blues are Smokey but creamy. I wouldn’t say any colour tastes like a fruit though, it’s more like.. descriptive instead of.. apple or peach. Like a mouth feel but there’s a flavour in it..?
I thought I was, like, a freak of nature when I was younger because I would see a colour and go “Oh! Hey that tastes like this!” And people would look at me like I was crazy. I lived almost two decades suffering with that before I got into Fallout Boy. I was listening to an interview with Patrick Stump, and he was mentioning synesthesia. I thought “oh that seems cool, I’ll use that as my medical essay.” Then I started researching and realised that I have it, or at least something similar to it. I don’t smell anything, but sometimes the flavour, I don’t know, feels like it’s saturating my nasal passages.
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