When it comes to massage room décor, color can play a role in helping create a soothing environment. You know not to paint your massage room fire-engine red if you want to create a relaxing effect—but there are a lot of paint options between fire-engine red and contractor white.
Now, science can help guide you to make the best paint-color choice for your massage room.
The Most Relaxing Color
Recently, a large, international survey showed that dark blue was the color most associated with a feeling of calm. If you just thought, “Uh, no,” there is a good reason. How someone responds emotionally to a color can differ depending on the context the color is presented.
Since a massage room is not usually brightly lit, a dark color would make the room even darker. In addition, a dark color would visually bring the walls in and make the room look smaller. Those two effects, darkness and “walls closing in,” don’t evoke a relaxation response in me. How about you?
I asked Sally Augustin, PhD, an environmental-and-design psychologist and a principal of Design with Science, a company that helps organizations apply research results to design, to weigh in on the most relaxing paint color for a massage room. She didn’t provide a one-color answer; instead, she explained what made a color relaxing and how to select a relaxing color.
Cool Colors for Massage Room Décor
According to Augustin, the less intense a color is, the more relaxing it is. Intense, vivid and bright colors, like fire-engine red, are highly saturated colors. Saturation refers to the degree a color differs from white. Fire-engine red has a saturation level of 84%.
A color with low saturation is washed out and pale, like a light grey. You make colors less saturated by adding white—literally. In terms of paint, you will be adding white paint to the paint color of your choice.
The amount of white paint you mix in depends on how light the paint is to start. So, a low-saturated (light) paint needs less white paint added to it to make it pale (and relaxing) than a high-saturated (dark) paint does.
With sage green, which has a low saturation level of 21.4%, “you can probably mix in as much white as you have sage green,” said Augustin. With darker greens, you will have to add more white.
Worth mentioning, during the course of the interview, Augustin did reveal that sage green and smoky blue—with a lot of white paint mixed in—were her favorite cool-color, paint picks for a massage room.
Warm Colors for Massage Room Décor
What if you are partial to warm colors, like red, yellow and orange? Follow the same formula: Start with a low-saturated, warm color and mix in white paint. For a massage room, Augustin said she likes smoky peach or a dusty orange with white paint added in.
A bonus with warm colors is they can literally make a space feel warmer to people. Augustin describes the effect as a 5 degree Fahrenheit effect—small but not insignificant in an indoor space. Warm colors can also make people seem friendlier. If you have a waiting room in your office, a warm color could help clients feel like they are surrounded by nice and caring people.
If you are stuck with contractor-white paint on your walls for reasons beyond your control, you can lessen the sterile, clinical effect by avoiding bright lightening and using indirect light like lamps and electric candles. Also, having a dimmer switch or three-way bulb will allow you to notch the brightness up a bit during intake without making the room too bright.
After You Paint
Unfortunately, after you paint your massage room, your work is not over. If the colors of the items in your massage room are competing with your paint color, you will be diminishing the relaxation effect of the paint on the walls.
A good rule of thumb when coordinating colors in a massage room is to have the darkest color underfoot and the lightest color on the ceiling. Why? According to Augustin, that is what humans are comfortable with because that is how colors appear to us outside: The ground is dark and the sky is light.
More specifically, when decorating in the massage room, choose colors that are shades of the paint color on your walls. To find shades of your paint color, Google “monochromatic color scheme.” Don’t forget that the blanket and sheets on the massage table are part of the visual effect.
If you have some design experience you may want to decorate with colors that are complementary (on the opposite side of the color wheel to your wall color) to create some visual interest. In that case, Google “complementary color scheme.”
If you are design adventurous, put a placebo suggestion on your freshly painted wall. A placebo suggestion could be the word “relax” on a print or wood carving. Make sure the word is written in cursive or a script that conveys calmness.
Keeping Massage Room Décor Simple
If you are design challenged, keep things simple by shooting for moderate visual complexity. If you had a few prints on the wall before you painted, re-hang them after you paint, but make sure to space them out in a way that provides a sense of order.
The operative words are “a sense of order.” Rigid order is not relaxing, according to Augustin.
Also, changing the frames of your prints to a color that is a shade of your wall color or in the same color family as your wall color is an easy way to carry on the relaxing vibe.
If you have decorations with geometric patterns in your massage room, take them out. They are not relaxing. Go to the thrift store and look for wall hangings and counter items that have curves, organic shapes and paisley patterns in them, Augustin suggested.
Create Mood with Your Décor
The mood you set with your massage room décor starts with the paint on your walls. For a relaxing effect, choose a low-saturated paint color and add white paint at a one-to-one ratio or until it appears pale.
Enhance the calming effect of the painted walls with indirect and soft lightening, and a placebo suggestion via a decorative sign. Decorate using shades of the wall color or colors within the color family of the wall color. When you do, you will have a massage room that whispers “relax.”
About the Author
Mark Liskey, LMT, CNMT, is a massage therapist, business owner, teacher and blogger. You can access his free, massage-business crash course on his business page.