You mean something like this?

no strict 'refs';
$red = "#ff0000";
$color = ${ "red" };
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Yes, it's possible :) and sometimes even useful, though in general you're better off reading (and understanding) perlref and using symbolic references, as the above are called, only when you really need them.

By the way, instead of "red" in ${ "red" } you can put any expression, which will be evaluated in scalar context to produce the name of the variable to use. Note that you can only access vars that are in the symbol table, so that if I did my $red = ...;, I would not have access to it using this technique.

Update: If this is your first go, maybe perlreftut would be an easier read. You cannot achieve deep understanding of Perl without reading the former, though.