Answer

Good question! People paint doors all the time and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with feng shui.

Some years ago in the U.S., McFengshui people were advising their clients to paint the front door red. It was never very clear what benefit was supposed to accrue, but it became almost an urban myth that you paint the front door red and “something” good would happen.

At the time of the fad, it didn’t matter that there might be reasons (according to authentic feng shui, common sense or aesthetics) that you would not paint your front door a shade of red. Nobody wanted to miss out: wives everywhere pressured their husbands to paint the front door. (I’m sure the request made no sense to the husbands, but painting the door silenced the nagging.)

So much of McFengshui is hype — and that was certainly the situation with the concept of the red front door. When the fad died, wives wanted husbands to paint the front door again — something besides red. (There were probably a few unwise husbands who asked what was wrong with the red door and got snapped at.)

From the perspective of authentic feng shui, color can have good effects, disagreeable effects, or no effects. It depends on the situation — that is, the location and the timing.

Researcher Andrew Elliot and colleagues, writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, advise that

color can act as a subtle environmental cue that has important influences on behavior.

According to the evidence, red does have a consistently positive result — if you are a sports team.

Achievements that rely more on mental abilities are not so fortunate. Seeing even a flash of red can mar student performance. This might be a case of color cultural values; only more research will tell.

Should we be concerned about lawsuits filed by parents whose child failed an important exam because they walked by the neighbor’s red front door?