What's a color reference and why do we use it?

So this is a Pinterest board. It's my own, one I set up. It's really just, you'll start to see, oh, here's a clump of purple stuff, here's some green stuff, here's some white and gold. It's all just giving yourself something to look at and then give yourself a direction to go in. I could just sit here not looking at reference, but this gets a result faster and you end up with more ideas to run with.

And there's stuff from all different styles here. It's not a question of whether it's manga or sci-fi or fantasy or whatever; you're looking for color combinations.

Pretty much, yeah. You can see here I have an eye; it's all over the place.