Color contrasts allow you to create home decorating schemes where the colors don't blend or merge but stand out from one another.
(Remember tint, lighter tone, and shade, darker tone). As this method sets light against dark, the most obvious scheme is black and white which shows the extremes of the light to dark scale.
If you remember, the yellow hue has a natural lightness, so combining yellow and black give a very good contrast. By the same token, blue or violet are the darkest natural hues, combining either of them with white will give you very good color contrasts as well.