Color is probably the most potent device available to artists, both amateurs and professionals. This is true of interior decorators and designers as well. Color influences shape, weight, size and temperature. It also is expressive in that color carries symbolism and emotion.

For example, we've been conditioned to respond to pink as a baby girl's color while blue is often reserved for the boy. Yellow and white have traditionally been non-gender colors for infants. Why? Who knows.

Girls instinctively like blue-based colors while boys have to be trained to like blue-based colors. It takes a sophisticated, well-educated man to prefer colors that are undetectably tinted with blue rather than their instinctive preference of colors that are yellow-based.

So why do baby girls get pink instead of the preferred blue? The answer is still ''Who knows?'' And yellow is the worst color for a baby's room because it has been proven that an infant will fuss and cry more in a yellow room than in a room of any other color.

Even in conversation, color is used for emphasis. ''Green with envy'' is a descriptive phrase, yet trees are green and no envy is shown there. When someone is described as having a ''yellow streak'' it means cowardice, yet there's nothing wimpish about a golden-yellow sunset. There seems to be no natural basis from which these sayings took their origin, yet we all understand what is meant when someone ''sings the blues.''

What about the experts who come up with odd ideas? Wassily Kandinsky, for instance, was a teacher and painter at the famous Bauhaus school of architecture and design. He proposed that yellow was akin to the shape of a triangle, red to the shape of a square and blue was symbolic of a circle. Do those color ideas fit in your pegs?

Salvador Dali, in his surrealistic paintings, established that color and form could stand outside reality and be extraordinary, even rambunctious. His biting purples, parrot blues, emerald greens and golden yellows were part of the magnetism of his art.

The point is, color has many faces. Some of our connotations and feelings for colors come from training, lifestyles and heritage. But when it comes right down to it, the beauty of a color is truly in the eye of the beholder.

Author Rosemary Sadez Friedmann is an interior designer in Naples, Fla.