Why does setting CLICOLOR=1 not turn on colors for "ls"? If I do ls -G, I do get the colors. From what I understood from the man pages, if I go into ~/.bash_profile and add export CLICOLOR=1 I would then get colors by doing just ls, as "This option is equivalent to defining CLICOLOR in the environment." 

Am I understanding this wrong? Because it's not working for me on Yosemite 10.10.5 in bash with homebrew coreutils(not sure how much of that is relevant). I tried adding this in ~./bashrc but same thing. I could always just alias my ls to ls -G, but I want to do this the "right" way. I also tried adding export LSCOLORS=... but it didn't help either. Like I said I do get colors with -G, but I'd like to get them by default by just typing ls and not having to set an alias for it, unless my understanding of how this works is wrong.
A few issues.

Homebrew coreutils ls is not the OSX/freebsd ls. Coreutils is GNU, and that ls uses --colors instead of -G. -G in gnu ls means do not show groups. It does not use CLICOLOR either. There is no environmental variable to set colors for gnu ls.

OSX's ls uses -G as a command line option, in the same way that exporting CLICOLOR would as an environmental variable.

So you are using the wrong variable for the wrong command.