Does pink pacify prisoners? The criminal allure of Baker-Miller Pink

If you get yourself thrown into prison in the US or Switzerland, you may find that your cell walls have been painted pink.

This is because a particular shade of pink has been reported to calm us down and reduce aggression.

But does it work? And if so, how?

Baker-Miller Pink, also known as Drunk Tank Pink, is a strong shade of pink made by mixing a gallon of white paint with a pint of red. It’s not unlike the colour of Pepto-Bismol.

It had calming properties attributed to it in the late 1970s by Alexander Schauss, director of the American Institute for Biosocial Research in Tacoma, Washington.

Schauss was fascinated by the work of a Swiss psychiatrist named Max Lüscher, who found that the colours we prefer depend upon our mood at that time. Lüscher would show his patients a series of colour cards, and the ones they favoured indicated their mental state — blues indicated they were feeling content, reds indicated they were feeling self confident etc.

Schauss flipped this around, hoping that by exposing someone to certain colours he could…