A Brief Guide To The Colors Of Severance

Week to week, season to season, Severance viewers rabidly comb over plot revelations, character dialogue, and even the smallest of set props as they try to piece together the show’s central mysteries. One of the show’s most consistent but subtle messages about characters and conflict comes in how Severance uses color. Like everything Severance, it seems to be calculated; across clothing and set decoration — and even elements of the show’s animated intro, like actors’ credits — the creators of Severance tell a story through reds, blues, and greens.

Severance’s use of color is not only highly intentional, it’s helpful in understanding characters’ intentions, allegiances, and behavior. For a show layered in puzzles and hidden meaning, it’s worth understanding what the show’s colors symbolize.

Here’s a brief guide to the most prominent colors of Severance, and what the show’s creators are trying to tell us through visual clues.

Blue

The color blue is representative of Lumon and the work half of work-life balance. Lumon housing is blue. The Macrodata Refinement team’s badges are blue. Blue is the dominant color of innies’ wardrobes and that of many Lumon employees like Ms. Cobel/Selvig and, at times, Mr. Milchick (though he often sticks to black and white shades; more on that below). 

Watching the blues of Severance becomes its own key to understanding the shifting allegiances and psyches of the show. Helly/Helena’s wardrobe is one of the most frequently used means of expressing behavior through color in Severance, particularly in how it incorporates blue. When she first appears in the show’s first episode, Helly R. is dressed all in blue — but her clothing color shifts throughout the season, eventually incorporating white, brown, and yellow. This puts her more closely aligned with her fellow MDR workers, palette-wise, and seems to tease the true conflict between her outie and innie. When Helly R. conforms to severed floor life, she wears a monochromatic yellow dress, and later regresses to blue as she works to disguise her true nature.

Red

The color red is representative of the outside world — the life half of work-life balance.

Scenes set outside Lumon, particularly around Mark, Gemma, Devon, and Ricken’s lives, prominently feature red. Ricken’s book The You You Are is “contraband” at Mark’s work, and its cover is predominantly red and orange. In their happiest flashbacks Gemma wears red clothes of varying hues. Mark wears red pajamas in Severance’s intro sequences. His outie drinks red wine to excess. Helly’s red hair — not actor Britt Lower’s natural hair color, by the way! — symbolizes her real-life separation from the rest of the MDR team.

Ricken actor Michael Chernus is the only person whose name appears in red in the show’s opening credits.

Red, blue, and purple

The contrast of red and blue can be seen throughout Severance, including the red and blue betta fish that live in a divided tank in Mark’s home. It seems unsurprising that Mark’s house would be best personified by such a direct clash: While Mark ostensibly enjoys work-life balance through the severance procedure, he lives in Lumon housing, his outie is closely monitored by Lumon employees, and his living quarters are where former Lumon employees seek refuge. Even beyond The Horrors of the show, it is impossible for Mark to actually enjoy the intended privilege of being severed.

But it’s not the only place: Conflict between red and blue is featured strongly in Petey’s arc in season 1. Petey wears a red and blue striped robe while hiding out at Mark’s as he struggles with reintegration sickness. Petey’s death scene is lit in red and blue, thanks to the flashing lights of police cars.

Sometimes, red and blue come together in splashes of purple — and here’s where the colorblocking gets even more intricate. In episode 1 of season 2 of Severance, as Mark sprints through a seemingly endless hallway, he passes a purple meeting room, which appears to represent the recent Overtime Contingency Protocol that sent innies to the outside world. Intriguingly, some of Mark’s substitute MDR coworkers — Gwendoline Y. (Alia Shawkat) and Mark W. (Bob Balaban) — have red-blue or purple clothing; Gwendoline wears a purple dress and Mark W. wears red and blue suspenders, a possible indicator of their experiences with reintegration.

One subtle use of purple in season 2 is clothing worn by Dylan’s wife, Gretchen. While she generally wears blue tones, she’s dressed in a light purple shirt in the scene in which she lies to outie Dylan about her visit with innie Dylan, indicating conflict between the two worlds she now inhabits.

Green

Green is seen throughout the show, but its meaning is less clearly defined than the usage of red and blue. Much of it appears to be related to the mysterious and important underground work being done at Lumon: The badges used by the Optics and Design and Mammalians Nurturable teams are green, and the nature of their work is thus far largely unexplained. Obviously, the grazing fields of the Mammalians Nurturable room is a lush grass green. The green carpeting and green dividers in the MDR office appear to serve as barriers between team members themselves and workers in the floors below. Much of what’s occurring underneath the severed floor is presented with green tones, including the Watchers Room and Gemma’s living quarters and clothing.

Green is also the color of Mark’s brain — or someone’s brain — in the show’s animated intro. Christopher Walken, Britt Lower, and Zach Cherry also have their names in green in the show’s opening credits. Green is also used in conjunction with red in a season 1 prop loaded with meaning: the red and green candle that Ms. Cobel steals from Mark, which also appears during the wellness session between Ms. Casey and Mark.

Severance’s use of green could have multiple interpretations. As seen in the goat room, it could indicate flourishing growth, hope, fertility, and springtime. But in traditional color theory, green often also has negative connotations: greed, sickliness, envy, and bile.

Green and blue

Some of the intersection of these two colors is a bit open-ended, given how much green represents a sort of mystery. But they’re combined enough on the show to be of note — particularly on Helly. While Helly R. sometimes wears a mix of green and blue together on the severed floor, Helena Eagan’s dress in the season 1 finale shows an intertwining helix of green and blue, one of the show’s less subtle uses of color: That pairing of colors indicates Lumon’s work combining with new growth and the coming of spring — the show has thus far been set during what feels like neverending winter — with Helly herself representing a new generation of the Eagan family.

Black and white

Lumon administrators and security personnel, including Seth Milchick, Ms. Huang, and Mr. Drummond, all wear a lot of black and white. Medical personnel on the testing floor, where Gemma is trapped, wear almost exclusively white. These employees’ lack of color implies restriction and order — in some cases, the clinical, analytical, or coolly dispassionate demeanors required of their jobs.

Also, Milchick just looks really cool in a black leather motorcycle jacket.