This year’s colour bakes in the anxiety, Eva Wiseman writes.
Do you know what I thought of when I saw Pantone’s new colour of the year, Cloud Dancer? I thought of the flash we’ll see at the end of the world. That blanched bleached white, like we’re closing our eyes to a terrible explosion which, I suppose, we already are.
Every year Pantone attempts to represent the zeitgeist by naming the colour we’ll be painting our houses come January, and every year it depresses the hell out of me.
The colour of 2025 was Mocha Mousse, which it described as an "evocative soft brown" and I described as "a little bit shitty". It was a beige in winter light, it was the colour of tradwifery and expensive scarves, it was in the colour family of fear, reflecting conservatism and, through the infinite vacuum of influencer taste, capitalism itself. I was slightly frightened.
The guys at Pantone know exactly what they’re doing when they gather to make their annual selection. In Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, every year a villager is chosen to be sacrificed in order to ensure a good harvest, families selecting slips of paper, afraid of finding the lethal black spot. Though this is what comes inevitably to mind as Pantone drags out one of its colours to be similarly stoned to death, there is no random selection here.
I picture the Pantone guys hooded, squinting at a spreadsheet in the light of a boardroom, their pupils inky and enormous. They have been digesting every data point and flake of news for months, calibrating not just the implications of each sly bomb or celebrity bag but how its action will ripple across the culture, and they will distil that feeling, that sense of hopelessness or joy or lust or shame, and place it in a colour.
And without fail, they will be right.
They say Cloud Dancer "acts as a whisper of calm and peace in a noisy world," I say, OK? But from here? It reflects a celebration of whiteness. In May, a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center saw the number of white nationalist groups in the US had fallen, but rather than this pointing to a decline in their influence, it showed their members had seen their beliefs normalised in government and mainstream society.
In the UK we’re seeing a similar shift as Reform drags its way into Parliament and the religious right increasingly guiding our politics. Trump’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion content and roles from government, saw a literal erasure of colour in American workplaces, which neatly reflected what was happening in the sea.
A marine scientist told the Guardian: "Ecological grief is real. People who spend a lot of time under the water see it changing before their eyes." This year the world’s coral reefs have seen the worst global bleaching event on record, with increasing temperatures turning more than 80% of the planet’s reefs white. Sorry, Cloud Dancer.
This is to take the colour choice literally though, and if I know one thing about the visual poets of Pantone it is that they trade largely in metaphor, enigma and vibe, so there are layers to the choice of a colour that is, really, an absence of colour. Here we are in the realm of colour as "cry for help".
This is the colour of baked-in anxiety, of flats where you’re not allowed to drink red wine, of no-makeup makeup that takes two hours to apply, and of minimalist aesthetics that reflect the self-doubt a generation has been encouraged to appropriate.
After years of screaming at each other on social media, where debates were sharpened to become currency, enough people have left Twitter that a white silence has settled - there’s the sense, the pale, lucid sense that it’s not worth sharing or indeed having an opinion, because nothing changes, apart from the loose recognition when looking at your phone that you might be slightly leaving your body. Cloud Dancer is the colour of ChatGPT therapy, or the sky at a time of crisis, or the moment you stop trying.
You have to hand it to Pantone - all the novelists, all the artists scrabbling away to define a moment, and here’s a colour company just ... posting it.
— The Observer
