'Colour of the Year' is a marketing exercise

Every December, a handful of colour-industry companies announce their Colour of the Year. The announcements generate hundreds of news articles, Instagram posts, and design-blog think pieces. Interior decorators and textile buyers in multiple industries reorganize their next season around the choice. Paint companies rush matching products to market. The colour itself appears everywhere for about nine months, gets tired, and is replaced by next year’s colour.

The entire ritual is one of the more elegant marketing operations in the design industry. It is not a scientific measurement. It is not a prediction. It is a branding exercise dressed up as a forecast, and the companies running it profit directly from getting the industry to care.

Here is how it works, who pays, and why you should feel free to ignore it unless you are in a very specific line of business.

The major players

Pantone. The biggest and loudest. Pantone has announced a Colour of the Year every December since 1999. The announcement is accompanied by a glossy PDF, licensed imagery, and a publicity tour by the Pantone Color Institute, a branded consultancy arm within the company.

• 2000: Cerulean Blue (PMS 15-4020)
• 2014: Radiant Orchid (PMS 18-3224)
• 2018: Ultra Violet (PMS 18-3838)
• 2022: Very Peri (PMS 17-3938), a colour Pantone invented for the announcement
• 2024: Peach Fuzz (PMS 13-1023)
• 2025: Mocha Mousse (PMS 17-1230), a soft cacao-brown, pitched as comfort, wellness, indulgence

The 2022 announcement is the most illustrative. Pantone did not pick an existing colour from their library. They invented a new one, named it “Very Peri,” added it to the Pantone library, and sold it back to customers as both the Colour of the Year and a new ink number. Every textile mill wanting to produce Colour of the Year products had to buy the new Very Peri recipe. This is a good business.

Benjamin Moore. An American paint manufacturer. Announces a Colour of the Year every October. Their announcements are lower-key than Pantone’s, geared toward interior decorators, architects, and the home-renovation press. Benjamin Moore’s announcements often sell measurably more paint in that specific colour during the year of its announcement.

Sherwin-Williams. Another American paint manufacturer, announces in August. Same model. Same sales bump.

Farrow & Ball. British paint manufacturer. Announces in August. Targets a more design-conscious, higher-end market than Benjamin Moore or Sherwin-Williams.

Dulux (and its parent AkzoNobel). European paint manufacturer. Announces in September.

WGSN, Coloro, and the Pantone ViewPoint Colour Board. Trade consultancies. These do not pick a single Colour of the Year but sell multi-year colour forecasts to fashion, textile, and consumer-product companies. The forecasts run to hundreds of pages and cost tens of thousands of dollars per subscription. This is the serious back-office industry that the consumer-facing Colour of the Year announcements are dressed-up versions of.

How the colour is actually picked

The process varies by organization, but the mechanics are broadly similar.

Pantone’s method (publicly described by the Pantone Color Institute):

1. An internal team tracks “emerging colour stories” across fashion runways, interior design shows, automotive trends, social media, popular art movies, food packaging, and major political or cultural events.
2. They prepare a shortlist of candidate colours and narratives.
3. A committee (the Pantone Color Institute executives) selects one, usually in autumn of the year before the announcement.
4. The PR team builds a narrative around the choice, “Very Peri represents the courageous creativity of a new era,” that kind of thing.
5. The announcement goes out the second week of December, timed to catch end-of-year trend-prediction content cycles.

Benjamin Moore’s method (described in interviews with their colour marketing team):

1. Internal designers travel to international design shows, interior design magazines, and material libraries during the spring.
2. They compile a mood board of trending colour directions across multiple sectors.
3. A committee picks a colour from their existing paint library that reflects those directions.
4. The announcement goes out in October, timed for spring-summer renovation planning.

The selection methods are opaque by design. No public audit, no methodology paper, no data on which trend inputs weighed how much. The committees are small. The “research” that informs the decision is curated rather than measured.

Why the industry takes it seriously anyway

Even though the process is arbitrary, the announcement has real economic effects. A Colour of the Year:

• Gets featured in ten thousand lifestyle articles in the first week.
• Appears in trend reports that fashion, packaging, and home-goods buyers use to plan their spring orders.
• Generates demand for the specific paint, fabric, or product in that colour.
• Gets licensed, companies pay Pantone or Benjamin Moore to use the Colour of the Year name and visual identity in their marketing.

Once enough buyers act on the announcement, the prediction becomes self-fulfilling. Consumers walk into a paint store and see a shelf of paints in variations of the Colour of the Year. They buy one. The buying pattern confirms the “trend.” The next year’s committee notes that the previous year’s colour sold well, and picks accordingly.

This is a coordination mechanism dressed as a forecast. The value is not in the accuracy of the prediction. The value is in giving the industry a shared focal point that hundreds of unrelated companies can align around.

When the Colour of the Year matters to you

For most designers and developers, the Colour of the Year is irrelevant. It has no bearing on whether your accent blue should be #3366FF or #2E5ADB. It does not affect accessibility thresholds, brand identity, or design-system architecture.

The exceptions are specific:

Interior design, architecture, real estate staging. Clients ask for Colour of the Year rooms. Builders want to match staged interiors to current trends. Knowing the current year’s colour is part of the basic vocabulary.

Fashion and textile. Buying cycles are eight to eighteen months ahead. Colour-of-the-Year announcements feed into these cycles. Not ignoring them is basic professional hygiene.

Consumer product packaging. Shelf appeal in supermarkets is partly driven by colour familiarity. Products that miss a major colour trend for three consecutive years can lose shelf presence.

Marketing and advertising. Campaigns referencing the Colour of the Year get a small amount of free press. Not reference-worthy by itself but a useful piggyback.

Design journalism. Writing about the Colour of the Year is a reliable content beat in December. If you run a design blog, you will write about it.

Pantone-adjacent industries. If you sell products to anyone in the above list, you care. If not, you do not.

The critique

The Colour of the Year ritual has a few legitimate critics, mostly in the academic colour-science world and in the design-criticism press.

One. The announcements are decoupled from any empirical measurement of public colour preference. Pantone has never published the underlying trend data. Nobody can verify the narrative.

Two. The selection reinforces colonial and commercial cultural biases. The committees are overwhelmingly based in North America and Western Europe. They pick colours that read well to that demographic. Global adoption of the chosen colour is then framed as “worldwide trend” when it is mostly US and EU adoption.

Three. The ritual encourages short-term thinking in industries that should think long-term. A brand whose primary colour chases Colour-of-the-Year announcements every year will have an incoherent brand identity. Long-lived brands pick a colour and stick with it for decades, Tiffany blue, John Deere green, UPS brown, Barbie pink.

Four. The environmental externality. Fashion, paint, and packaging churn, producing and disposing of products in the “wrong” colour, is a significant waste stream. Industry coordination around a new “right” colour every year accelerates this churn.

None of this will stop the announcements. They make too much money for the companies doing them. But knowing the ritual for what it is, a branded marketing calendar moment rather than a genuine prediction, lets you decide when to care and when to ignore.

The Colour Love take

Colour.love exists because we think every colour is worth naming, not just the ones a Pantone committee picked in autumn. There are 16,777,216 colours in the 24-bit sRGB space. Pantone has named approximately 2,000 of them. Crayola another 120. X11 another 140. That leaves 16,774,956 colours nobody has bothered to name.

You can adopt any of them for a dollar. You pick the colour. You pick the name. No committee, no narrative, no licensing fee. A single small act against the idea that a handful of colour-industry committees get to decide what matters.

Some of the colours you adopt will be utterly unremarkable, mid-greys, dim blues, muted beiges. Some will be spectacular. Both are fine. Every colour has a permanent place in the sRGB grid. Every colour deserves a name. The Colour of the Year is a real marketing event. The colour of your choice is a permanent claim.

Pick wisely. Pick weirdly. Name it what you like. The ritual is a dollar and a web form. You outlast the ritual by centuries.