#synaesthesia

CECIL:

the first is his voice like,,, normally, his voice is a very VERY nice colour and i like it.

the second is when he’s happier, especially when he’s talking about carlos. it gets brighter and lighter, plus sort of pink. it’s very mmmmm

the thrid is specifically when he’s like “STEVES CARLSBURGG >:(“ or otherwise angry :}

CARLOS:

the first one is pre-throat spiders :} it’s a a lot,,, dustier?? i have zero clue how to describe it. still very nice:D

the second is post-throat spiders. it went from green to like blue and purple. its very pretty. seems edible:}

third is when he’s talking about stuff he’s passionate about/dorking out. it doesnt to nearly as noticeably lighter, like cecil’s does, but it does go purple-er

KEVIN:

since kevin’s voice stays like,,, mostly one tone, i used his pre, during, and very post strex voices from episode 73 triptych (which destroyed me)

pre — his voice is almost sand coloured, it’s much warmer :D

during — it’s gold, but artificially so—like plastic gold. it’d definitely also have that texture too, like a cheap plastic coin. it’s still nice to listen to, but the colour isnt as nice. the actual colour i managed to get doesnt show it nearly as well

post — his voice is like drained of colour and has the texture of drywall or a popcorn ceiling. it also has some blue mixed it, but it’s not super noticeable. (ough my baby</3)

Danhausen: lemon, petrichor, leather

Speedball Mike Bailey: boston creme donut, specifically what it smells like when you go into a Dunkin Donuts

MJF: oak, cologne that smells like bourbon and orange

he's soft and pale and fragile, like the quivering colours of a fairy's wings, warm against the shimmering blue of a river. like the velvet colours of tiny flowers in a green field.

like a shimmering unicorn horn, cruelly harvested from the animal for its magic healing properties, regarded as so revered and so precious that it's kept locked away in the dark for centuries to come.

(until a righteous warlock comes along, protesting the cruelty against unicorns and stops the extermination of their kind for good. the unicorns with their shining periwinkle horns are forces of unbelievable power, and should not have their magic snuffed out for the petty greed of mankind.)

beomgyu is unreal, mythical, a translucent purple-blue that is only heard of and never truly seen.

but he's also the grittily real colour of three day-old bruises, of veins visible through the thin skin of the wrists, of faded blue ballpoint on palms because your friends doodled on your hands that morning and the ink has yet to be fully rubbed away. he's the colour of life, of being lived-in, of proof that you're alive and have done things and you exist, you exist, you exist.

beomgyu is translucent purple-blue, grounded in reality not quite, the edges fizzling into something softer, more whimsical, like an impossibly thin silk cloth that drapes perfectly over your skin.

request a synaesthesia post for another member?

This is solidarity!

I honestly think more people are synesthetic than people realize! Mainly because people don't know what synesthesia actually *is.*

This gives me the opportunity to share not only the synesthesia tree [link], which is a very cool website, but also my rundown of the main types of synesthesia!

I'll put it below the cut, if anyone wants to read it!

Synaesthesia is when a person has a brain that triggers an atypical secondary response to sensory input. This secondary response could be the activation of another sense, or it could be the activation of a specific thought process.

A person who has synesthesia is called a Synesthete.

My primary synaesthesia is ordinal linguistic synaesthesia and it’s pretty rare for me to associate colours with people. It’s either there at first and then fades out or just very surface level, e.g. my childhood Italian teacher was red, my science teacher green and my maths teacher yellow. There have only been a handful of people in my life where they gave off a strong impression of a colour and it actually stuck or developed.

For example, my mum is a nutty beige but it’s very quiet, only appears a few times but is mostly present. There was this friend that was dark green when I first met her. And she continued being so strongly green I could sometimes see the colour hovering above her face (no she wasn’t sick nor was she stinky.) If I have to describe it I guess I would say she was green in the way that it’s refreshing like a breath of fresh air. Not mint, but a windy day. And there was also a little mischief in her that would make me think, ‘that’s so green.’

Book characters sometimes have colours too. In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll is an emerald dark green whilst his counterpart Mr Hyde is a dark murky brown.

My first impression of Yuma was a creamy bright yellow that shines like shy pearls. A blinding smile but you could still feel his shyness and it wasn’t to the point of being hyperactive. He was wearing dark clothes (and Beijing 2022 was also pretty gloomy) but his face shone a million watts. I feel that because of his newness and freshness amongst other seniors, he shone very brightly.

Come post-injury, his skating got so much better, his movements more beautiful and precise and there was more meaning behind. There was also a refined elegance to it that didn’t come off as pretentious. That’s when I first started associating dark purple. I’d read his interviews and think of the colour. In his practice sessions when he has this stoic face on, he is very purple. And for a long time, he was showing a lot of purple. In the interview where he was talking about a lack of confidence, I remember vaguely thinking, ‘that is so purple of him.’

I have better vocabulary now to describe why he is purple like maturity, responsibility, awareness, deep passion but the explanation that makes the most sense in my head is that Yuma is purple the same way 9 is purple.

For context, OLP (ordinal linguistic personification) makes numbers have personalities. For me, 9’s colour is purple, they are neither a boy nor a girl, they are responsible, mature, very aware of their position and also quite self-conscious. In fact, the colour purple itself in all its glory and magnificence, is very self-conscious that they’re not as calm and serene as blue and also never as passionate as red. 9 is insecure of the fact that they are not an even number nor are they double-digit. (To add to this, 8 is blue and a very chill and calm guy, 10’s red and he’s very boastful. I don’t know which one came first since I found out 9 was self-conscious later on because they hid it very well. I don’t believe it to be a coincidence; one had to come from the other, I just don’t know which.)

In the same way, I don’t need to say it, but Yuma knows and also talked about how he’s not like his seniors, that he doesn’t have as much star power as them and he also knows he can’t be like Ilia with his highly technically difficult programs. But, just like purple and 9, he is very accepting of that fact and continues forward, turns up, skates his best and shows who he is even if he stumbles along the way which I think is very admirable.

I was actually very surprised myself when I realised these connections.

But those are not the only aspects of Yuma that make him purple. His personality differs from 9 but those sides are also purple. Like his nervousness or his perfectionist attitude. Even when he is happy I saw it as that too like when he smiled and bumped his fists up after performing Sound of Silence very cleanly. It was a quiet moment of elation.

So it was very surprising to see bright cream yellow make an appearance again. I caught up with the season pretty late so when I first watched I Wish at gpf 2025, I was surprised and ecstatic that he was so happy. And he was actually showing yellow. It was always present in the background but this time it was like coming out in waves. So much so that when I’d recall the program, I thought he was wearing a yellow-cream shirt. And then I’d watch the video again and see him wear white and get very confused. During that time I didn’t know I had personality-colour synaesthesia. As I said, I found out pretty recently.

It wasn’t the first time this happened with him. His Rain in Your Black Eyes outfit is dark blue but for the longest time I remembered it as dark purple to the point that when I watched it again, I was even a little upset when I noticed it was blue all along. But because it still is such a pretty outfit, I accepted it easily and thought in my head, ‘well at least there’s that other purple shirt he wore even if it is ugly.’ Lo and behold, the shirt he wore for the gala performance at worlds 2025 is not a mix of very dark purples and white but just black and white. (I literally had to go check again real quick because my mind was deceiving me yet again.)

This is the whole reason why I went and searched up on why I feel so strongly about colours for certain people and then I came across personality-colour synaesthesia. I already knew I had OLP and I thought you could only have one but it’s actually very common for people who have one to have multiple. That was pretty cool to find out.

Other notes:

I’m aware I’m talking about numbers and colours like their actual people. Don’t worry guys; I had a lot of friends at school. No it’s not me being imaginative; I thought everyone saw numbers like that and I was surprised when I found out they didn’t.

I have associative synaesthesia which means that I think of the colour or personality but I don’t actually see it (except for rare times with my friend or with how I keep on misremembering the colour of Yuma’s outfits.)

Sometimes certain names also have colours. A few examples are Austen being baby pink, Augustus orange, Axel is red because of A and X, Lutz is purple with a blue bias and Salchow does have its colour except I don’t know what it is. (When Yuma jumps his beautiful 4S I usually associate purple anyways.)

Another figure skater that I associate colours with is Kao. He is apricot orange but when he has an intense look on his face during his programs and he speeds through the ice, he also gives off a fiery orange. When he is with Yuma or Shun or I read his interviews, I think of apricot orange. Apricot orange always gives off good feelings but growing up the colour orange was pretty confusing to me and now that I think about it, it checks out on why Kao is orange. He's a very fun person.

I noticed that if a person has something attached to them, that becomes my first impression and it’s pretty hard to associate a colour with them after that. They lose a bit of that novelty to them. Like for example, with Yuzuru Hanyu he has a strong personality and when I watch his interviews he seems like a very endearing person. I keep on thinking he has a colour but I cannot link anything back because I first found out two-time Olympic gold-medallist and figure skating icon before I even watched a clip of him. T-T

Yuma sold Romanza so well. The program is burgundy, a rich brown and there are a few specs of sparkles to it. Purple was still present but it took a backseat. The music, composition and especially the way he presented it makes it very memorable.

Sound of Silence is undebatably purple. It has got to do with communication and understanding and he delivered that message really well. I felt like there was a delicate rawness to this program.

During the Olympics, Yuma was showing a lot of yellow. It was a bit like Beijing 2022 except more extroverted and a little hyperactive. The pearly shyness to it faded away and gave off to a brighter sunnier feeling. But you know, on Friday 13th, it went so quickly to a dark dull purple again that it kind of made me feel a little sick. That one edit on twt absolutely guts me.

I know he likes blue a lot so I kind of feel a little bad. But it’s not like I don’t like him wearing blue. I just don’t associate blue with him. He’s purple to me, I can’t really change that.

I know I talked a lot about how 9 and he have a lot of similarities but I need you to know that if Yuma were to be a number he'd be an even one.