Meet Ella London, the yellow lady

Karen Haller 01
Karen Haller

Meet Ella London, the Yellow Lady or as she is happy to be known as Miss Sunshine. Yep, she’s a woman who wears yellow from head to toe. I first came across Ella when I saw her New York Post video which has been viewed over half a million times since it came out on March 14th 2018. I was so fascinated about why somebody would wear just one colour and I also felt really drawn to her (which is a trait of the colour yellow) so I contacted her to find out more.

And coming across this lady was perfect timing. We’ve been having one miserable cold, grey spring in the UK so far and since yellow is the colour that represents spring, who better to bring some cheery spring yellow into our lives than Ella London aka Miss Sunshine, a Brit who lives in LA.

Ella has lives in LA for seven years and when we got on the phone, the first thing I wanted to know from her if she was going to pick any colour, why yellow?

She retold the story of when she was organising her wedding ten years ago, she was thinking of how to honour and acknowledge her father who passed away when she was only two months old. It was her fiancé who suggested bringing in the colour yellow as it was her father’s favourite colour. He had painted their front door and window frames bright yellow and whenever someone spoke of her father it was always about his happy smiles and making people laugh. Now if that was a colour it would be yellow!

Ella knew she didn’t want a typical wedding colour. She felt that red was too Christmasy, lilac and those typical wedding pastels overused… and after her fiancé suggested yellow, it just clicked, and she was surprised she hadn’t made that connection sooner. Making yellow a feature of her wedding made Ella feel she was honouring the memory of her late father.

This is where Ella’s colourful fascination began, and it continued over the years as a way for her stay connected with her father. For her this “isn’t about any morbid connection with someone who has died” she sees it as “a way to continue my dad’s legacy.”

From a professional perspective this shows that Ella’s connection to yellow actually has its roots in personal colour association which is one of the three main ways we relate to colour (the other two being colour symbolism and colour psychology).

Ella’s love of yellow started at the wedding and it was never her intention to go all yellow. This just happened organically. Initially, she was thinking “this is a cool colour, people like it, I like it and this will be my Steve Jobs thing” – he famously only wore black.

So over the next four years yellow was appearing in more and more areas of her life – when something in the home broke she would replace it in yellow. Receiving lots of yellow gifts, one day someone gave her a yellow cardigan – and this Ella says was the “catalyst to me wearing yellow everyday”.

By 2012 Ella was wearing yellow every day.

This hasn’t come without attention. She has had people worry about her, praying for her and she says she’s fine with that. She kept wearing yellow because people always smile. People stop and chat with her. She feels that people stop her because of the yellow and others because yellow makes her approachable.

And that’s how I felt, I knew when I watched the New York Post video, she came across genuinely happy, friendly and approachable. It’s one thing to wear head to toe yellow and it’s another to shine “yellow” – with Ella, she is congruent. What you see is what you get.

With the work that I do in Applied Colour Psychology it’s fascinating to meet someone who could be surrounded by so much of the one colour and not feel its adverse traits. When it comes to yellow, being surrounded by too much yellow can potentially cause someone to feel depressed.  As it turned out Ella had experienced depression in the past but she used the colour yellow to help her lift herself out of that depression.

This won’t certainly won’t be the case for everyone. I was really surprised she used yellow in this way, because for some people yellow could make them even more depressed as yellow can have a negative impact on the nervous system.

But if Ella’s story illustrates anything it’s that colour is personal and for her, yellow is her happy colour. By connecting with the positive psychology traits of yellow Ella was able to lift her spirits, lift her self-confidence and her self-esteem.

As part of this she started posting an image a day on her Instagram feed to spread happiness, smiles and sunshine. So this was not only a way to bring happiness to others but a way to heal and bring happiness back into her own life.

And Ella didn’t realise anyone else was only wearing one colour until she came across the pink lady of Hollywood and now they are good friends ‘Oh my God, are there other people who wear only one colour’. She finds it fun to meet and see why others choose to do this and their reasons behind it. Ella is still to meet the green lady of Brooklyn NY who used to love lots of different colours and one day she discovered green and that was that. And I’m sure there are others out there.

For some people when they see yellow they just feel sunshine and happiness and for others they just want to run from it.

I have to say chatting with Ella, her energy, she really is like a ray of sunshine. She certainly brightened my grey London day. Her mission is simple “To bring sunshine and create smiles!” and she’s certainly does that!

Obviously yellow is Ella’s happy colour and the wonderful thing about colour is it’s personal and you don’t have to wear a colour from head to toe in order for it to have an impact. So when you’re out and about what colour do you see on a regular basis that you feel like if you were to have it in your home, the office, in your clothes what colour would that be for you?

If you want to connect with other colour lovers from around the world, come over to the colour collective.

Karen x

Check out:
The New York Post video that inspired me to get in touch with Ella.

YouTube video

 

Ella’s Instagram feed of yellow happiness https://www.instagram.com/ellalondon/

And stay tuned for her book coming out…

p.s. I’m going to be interviewed soon in UK Elle Magazine on yellow being touted as the new ‘millennial pink’.

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