The bucket and the beat by Michael Fallarino

Selling Vibrations:
The CIB Simulator (Part Two of Two)

Okay, so picking up where I left off last month, when your customer comes in to buy paint or solid-color stain what do you currently have in your store that is part of a display, a device, or a constitutional-wavelength-deployment-simulator that helps them to effortlessly dial-in the right colors for their project? Now I haven’t seen one of these yet, but let me tell you what would be ideal: a CIB, or Color Isolation Booth. Yep, that’s right. Never heard of it? Well to be perfectly honest (and I always try to be) I never did either, but it makes sense, and sensing, when it come to color is what it’s all about, Alfie. (Did I just date myself or what?)

By this point you’re thinking "What the ?/$* is he TALKING ABOUT? Let me put it this way. Most of us are still hung up on the mental conception that we see color. Strictly speaking, we don’t. Why? Because color is actually an energetic transmission. It’s a wavelength and not a fixed object.

Okay, so now you’re thinking "allright Mr. smartypants, so what the heck do you think I’m doing when I dispense pigments into a base?" Well guess what? You’re DEFINITELY NOT adding color. That’s because pigments are not highly concentrated forms of color that become disbursed in bases. Pigments are substances that regulate the absorption and reflection of wavelengths.

For the sake of common parlance we speak about the visual impact of color as if vision was the primary sense we were using to perceive the effect that color has on us. But according to James Balch, M.D., in his 5-million-plus-copies-sold book Prescription for Nutritional Healing, "Remarkably, color seems to have an effect even on blind people, who are thought to sense color as a result of energy vibrations created within the body."

To bring the point closer to home allow me to paraphrase Bob Brame of Cadiz Hardware in Cadiz Kentucky, from his comments in Paint Talk Digest 119 (have you joined yet?). His store employee who has the best eye for color and who is best at matching colors for customers claims that he is color blind! Bob, are you paying attention?

So where does all this leave us? Lemmie return to my CIB idea. Manufacturers "progressive" schemes to approximate natural lighting around their in-store paint displays does no one any favors. By now you should be picking up the thread. Painting contractors know that no matter how hard they try to help their customers select appropriate colors (including brushing "test patches" from sample quarts) once a whole house or room is colorized the customer is going to second-guess his rationale and feel uneasy enough to lapse into a state just short of catatonia.

So what we really need to do to help consumers nail-down color choices is to put them into a Color Isolation Booth. This is a little chamber in your store’s paint section in which they are surrounded by a computer-generated visual field of their chosen color(s) while lying in a recliner blindfolded. At least that way people will be forced to come to their senses while choosing colors.

In the West we tend to be pretty rational about things all the time. But in East Indian medicine there has existed for thousands of years a system of color use that harmonizes personal constitutional and proprietary business factors with a model of color choosing that induces balance. It’s based on a cosmology that is energetic in nature and not reducible to anything static.

I recommend that you kick back at your local Indian restaurant with a mango lassi, and some pakora and nan appetizers, and contemplate what kind of risk you need to take to integrate some color balance into your own life. [September 2002]

©2002 Michael Fallarino/Pan-Global Gumbo SM, Ltd.