have a spreadsheet where a particular status is colorized based on multiple conditions. would like to format the cell based on its color.
This sounds pretty twisted like “Conditional formatting of conditional formatted cells” and needs further explanation … (at least I can’t understand, what you want to achieve). But generally speaking: Since there is no function (not talking about macros), which evaluates the cell color, consequently there can’t be any conditional formatting based on cell color.
The Conditional Formatting feature uses the Cell Styles, what contain the property “Cell background Color” too. You can not apply a condition based on one formatting property to change an another formatting property of a specific cell.
Use the cell values and other REAL DATA and FORMULAS as conditions. The format properties are not DATA.