3 ideas
The emotional and symbolic associations of a color are not intrinsic but assigned by cultural context — white signals purity in some societies and mourning in others. Designers who treat color meaning as universal will misfire in markets that encode it differently.
Dominant color palettes in any era are constrained first by which pigments are chemically available and affordable, not by aesthetic taste alone. The cheapness of synthetic mauve after 1856, for example, made the color suddenly ubiquitous because production cost collapsed, not because preferences shifted.
A color is never perceived in isolation; its appearance shifts based on the colors adjacent to it, so the same hue reads warmer, brighter, or duller depending on its surroundings. Effective design specifies color in relationships and pairings rather than as fixed isolated values.