As we enter 2024 with trepidation, let us take comfort in the fact that this year’s “Colors of the Year” are actual colors.
I’m an interior-design enthusiast who takes color very seriously. Over the course of seven years, I agonized over narrowing down dozens of saved paint samples to just five shades with which to paint the walls of a hypothetical cabin. Monet and I are simpatico — color is our “day-long obsession, joy and torment.”
The online algorithms are well aware of my interest in interior decorating ideas, which may explain my impression that paint manufacturers put out a new “Color of the Year” every couple of months. I found Benjamin Moore’s “Raspberry Blush” (2023) refreshingly bold, and I welcomed the glamorous Gatsby vibes lent by Sherwin Williams’s “Naval” back in 2020. The elevation, however, in recent years of “Ultimate Gray,” “Urbane Bronze,” “Rustic Greige” and other takes on Gulag aesthetics led to a drab plague, visible on Zillow, that has hitherto appeared incurable.
Determined to find the culprit of this unforgivable color crime, I did some research. To my horror, I learned there’s a sort of World Economic Forum for color trends.
“[The Color Marketing Group], which is based in Alexandria, Virginia, is a non-profit that helps pick and predict colors for a variety of products,” reported the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “CMG members (color design professionals including officials from the Pantone Color Institute) gather throughout the year in a series of ‘ChromaZone’ workshops around the world to discuss the future and what color it’s going to be.”
Color forecasts are apparently influenced, at least in part, by “politics, pop culture, technology and social issues,” which explains the dreadful choices of recent years. Yet there is hope on the horizon: among the seven hues Architectural Digest tells us “companies are predicting will rule 2024” are “a soft, airy blue,” an energetic and optimistic light yellow and “a garden of earthy green delight.” Only Behr’s “Cracked Pepper” misses the bright, cheerful mark, but at least the moody charcoal shade makes a statement!
Three years ago, my cabin became a reality, and its walls now alternately radiate and smolder with “Firefly,” “Norway Spruce,” “Philipsburg Blue,” “Jack Pine” and “Tally-Ho” (the color names are a big deal, too, by the way). As we look ahead to the new year (and await Pantone’s Color of the Year), let us close the chapter on aesthetic-assaulting shades of gray and turn a new page to color, glorious color!
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2024 World edition.
