 <p>As is often the case for maintaining the state of a table view cell, the right answer is to keep the state in your model. In other words, if tempArray is your model containing a collection of objects that describe the table's contents, add a BOOL attribute to those objects meaning something like <code>userAdded</code>.</p> <p>Then your "cell was inserted" pseudo-code can become:</p> <pre><code>MyModelClass *modelElement = [tempArray objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; if (modelElement.userAdded) { cell.mylabel.textColor = [UIColor redColor]; } else { cell.mylabel.textColor = [UIColor blackColor]; } </code></pre>