Top 7 Wedding Colour Schemes

What is a wedding colour scheme?

Your wedding colour scheme sets the tone for the entirety of your wedding style.

It’s the first step to styling your wedding and will greatly impact other styling choices you'll make. Wedding planning such as the invitations, floral arrangements, furniture, bridesmaid dresses and just about everything - your wedding colour palette greatly impacts your wedding day visuals. When your guests walk into your wedding, they’ll see clearly the thoughtful colour scheme that will flow through various details of the wedding decor.

Choosing your colour scheme first, will make the rest of the wedding planning a whole lot easier!

How to choose a wedding colour scheme

When choosing your wedding colours it’s important to consider the season, the location of your wedding as well as your personal tastes and preferences.

Your wedding day should be a reflection of the relationship that you and your partner share and the creativity you both bring to the partnership. Before you set your mind on a colour, reflect on what each other’s favourite colours are.

What colours do you often to gravitate towards? Do you prefer light and bright or, moody and dark? What colour clothes do you often wear?

Consider these questions and imagine the colour scheme incorporated into your wedding.

Wedding Colour Ideas

It’s one of the most important styling decisions you will make for your wedding day… no pressure or anything - but your wedding colours are kind of a big deal!

To give you a head start on planning your wedding day - here, we’ve listed the top 7 wedding colour ideas you need to know.

1. Blue, blue and more… blue!

Raise your hand if you love blue!

With blue’s many shades such as navy blue, light blue, classic blue, dusty blue or periwinkle blue - it’s no wonder why blue is the world’s most favourite colour.

The colour is renowned for promoting calmness and tranquillity, often reminding us of the rain or the ocean. No matter which blue you choose, it’s a beautiful, meaningful and popular colour that makes for a fantastic choice for weddings.

Blue is incredibly versatile and can be worked into various wedding elements and themes.

For an elegant and sophisticated look you can combine navy blue and burgundy throughout your wedding - offering a mature and tasteful aesthetic to your wedding colour palette. These colours work beautifully for evening weddings, a winter wedding or for overcast days where the sky is grey.

For a lighter and softer aesthetic, dusty blue and dusty pink offer stunning visuals. Paired with big and lush flowers, and gorgeous decor - these colours fit spring weddings perfectly.

Alternatively, go all out with your love for blue and choose a colour palette of various shades of blue. From light blue to dark blue - due to its versatility, you can create a rainbow of blues that can flow through your entire wedding.

2. Forest greens

Whether you’re a nature-lover, you prefer darker colours or you simply have an appreciation for this timeless shade - then you’ll want to know how to fit forest green into your wedding colours.

Forest green (not to be confused with emerald green, which is a slightly lighter, richer colour) works as a beautiful primary colour, only needing simple secondary colours to build a captivating colour scheme.

Combining forest green with wood, timber, whites, blacks or even shades of dusty pink for a romantic/vintage look - all offer beautiful aesthetics for your wedding day.

You can also rely on a selection of greens to build your wedding colours. For example, pairing sage green with another green colour such as emerald green will create bold pops to your wedding decor.

If your wedding location is being held in a forest, amongst trees, in a vintage interior or even in a luxe hall - forest green will match your wedding decor perfectly.

With the green being so rich and paramount, you’ll want to soften the colour with delicate wedding colours such as white, light pink and/or gold or silver. Try balancing the rich greens with light dusty rose bridesmaids dresses or classic white flower arrangements.

3. Pastel and pink

For a delicate, romantic and dreamy aesthetic - you’ll want to consider a pastel wedding colour palette.

Pastel wedding colours offer a cohesive colour narrative to your wedding.

To build your pastel wedding colours, you’ll want to select 2 primary colours such as dusty pink and dusty blue. Next, select 2 secondary colours such as butter yellow and forest green. Your primary colours will be your central wedding colours used in your bridesmaid dresses, flowers, seating and centrepieces. Whilst your secondary wedding colours will be sprinkled throughout the wedding elements.

There’s room for creativity when it comes to pastel colour palettes too. Choose your favourite pastel colours and work with your wedding planner to tie these into various elements of your wedding day. You might select pastel lemon yellow and pink as your primaries with blue and green as your secondary wedding colours.

The options for pastel wedding colours are endless!

4. Bold contrasts

There’s just something that draws you in when you see contrasting bold wedding colours. Think: purple and yellow, orange and blue, green and red. When executed correctly, these colours create a stunning mise en scene for your wedding colours.

To use bold wedding colours effectively, you’ll want to rely on a colour wheel for direction. Choose one colour that you love and then the colour wheel will present to you the corresponding contrasting colour. The result is a perfect match of two bold and rich colours that are incredibly pleasing on the eyes.

A popular way of using bold wedding colours is choosing rich red roses and dark green fauna both from the leaves of the roses as well as the natural setting. If your wedding location is in a setting with plenty of green foliage, working with contrasting red roses is an easy way to blend beautiful wedding colours into your colour palette.

There's plenty of bold contrasting wedding colour combinations to choose from. Work with your partner to find the wedding colours that you both love the most. From here, you'll be able to develop a colour palette made for both of you.

5. Classic white

White wedding colours have played an important part in the history of all Western weddings, especially for Christian religious traditions.

Originating from the white wedding dress, white wedding colour trends have been popular ever since the Victorian era when elites such as Queen Victoria famously wore her white lace wedding dress. Since this notable moment, the white wedding dress - and white wedding colour trends in general - have become an important element to all weddings.

In fact, for Western weddings, it’s become a rarity to see a wedding where the bride is wearing anything but a white wedding dress!

White wedding colours are timeless, elegant and sophisticated. Plus, due to white's minimalism - they’re much easier to design! It’s no wonder why they’ve been a go-to for decades.

To create a beautiful white wedding theme, choose simple yet, high quality white fabrics, glass dinnerware and white floral arrangements. Combined with timber features or silver or gold detailing - white weddings colours deliver breathtaking visuals.

6. Glam it up with gold

As mentioned briefly throughout this article, combining gold in the details of your wedding can add a simple yet impactful accent colour to your wedding colour palette.

One of the many trending colour palettes that is currently gaining more popularity is gold as the main wedding colour. Gold wedding colours are similar to white as a wedding colour trends, in the sense where both gold and white are very versatile wedding colours.

You can pair gold wedding colours with just about every wedding colour combination. Whether you're after bright colours, pastel summer wedding colours or, a moody winter wedding colour palette - gold fits in perfectly everywhere!

If you've already chosen your wedding colours and you would like to incorporate gold into your colour combo don't worry, you can! There are many opportunities to add gold, rose gold or jewl tones into your wedding scene. Choose gold flatware to be placed on white table linens or add rose gold detailing to your wedding bouquet or even sprinkle jewel tones throughout the grand ballroom!

Take your wedding colours to another level with gold accent wedding colours.

7. Get creative!

At the end of the day, this is your wedding day! Despite what anyone else thinks, your wedding colours should reflect your personal tastes.

If you love bright wedding colours, dark wedding colours or even themed wedding colour palettes then choose those wedding colours! Sometimes it can be best to even ignore the trending wedding colours so you can create the wedding style you love.

Your wedding day is all about you and the new chapter you're celebrating with your partner. As long as you both are excited about the wedding colours you've chosen - that's all that matters.