Confident Colors Making Striking Bedrooms For Teens

Passionate color seems to define adolescent bedrooms. Young people who are trying to define their identities revel in shades that express their energy and exuberance. Fortunately, there's an interior decorating guide to cover this youthful intensity: it's all right to use several strong colors together as long as they're balanced.

Decorating a teen's bedroom can either be a contest of wills or a surprising opportunity to pass along some life lessons. A young person's penchant for strong color provides Mom and Dad a chance to impart a little color psychology (along with shelling out the cash for new bedroom décor).

Many youngsters find that identifying a favorite color or color combination is an important step to developing their sense of self. Parents can capitalize on this by getting hold of a color wheel and a book on the psychology of color to help their teen-ager decide which hues he or she likes best.

What's more, understanding color psychology also helps everyone get through the turbulence of adolescence a little easier. Teen-agers are sensitive to emotions, and the color scheme of their bedrooms can go a long way toward creating an environment that comforts and strengthens them. For example, an artistic young woman may choose a dramatic combination that combines fuchsia bed linens with magenta polka-dot pillows and shocking pink rugs. Strong as such a combination sounds, it can produce a balanced scheme as long the intensity of the colors matches.

Note that the deepest color in this scheme – magenta – is used as the accent color. This makes it easier to change accent colors to give the room a totally different look in the future. Determining the color scheme makes it far simpler to choose furniture and accessories when it comes time to change those as well. Giant tropical flowers can be graphic accents for this color combination, but any favorite motif from music to sports can be worked into this theme with stencils, freehand murals or even wallpaper.

Teen boys also love intense colors. To avoid a penchant for depressing black, steer young men towards saturated tropical combinations, such as a deep shade of turquoise for walls contrasted with lime green and orange. A colored Flokati rug in either of the contrasting hues would add texture and excitement to the scheme. Such hot colors can sound overwhelming, but it turns out that they're much more livable than they seem. All it takes is a little balance, adding some areas of white, a coordinating neutral or an accent wall in a pale hue of one of the main colors.

Some teen-aged boys like the contrast of lights and darks. If that appeals, consider suggesting a combination such as navy blue with yellow. Blue is a popular color for boys' rooms, but insist on typical blues. Let the young man choose whatever intense shades strike his fancy, and then help him find the complementary or contrast colors that will balance his main color choice. There's no reason he can't have a blue-on-blue bedroom if that's what he really wants. All an astute parent has to do is to help him choose the tints that will create the best color combination possible.