Earlier this month, many attractive people filled a room in Lower Manhattan. They drank elaborate cocktails and gazed upon Instagram-y art installations and left with a gift bag that contained, among other things, earbuds studded with Swarovski crystals. The vibe was high-end, sophisticated, arty. The guest of honor was a color.
Pantone throws a party like this one annually, in conjunction with the announcement of its “Color of the Year.” For 2026, it’s “Cloud Dancer,” which, the company notes in a press release, “serves as a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society rediscovering the value of measured consideration and quiet reflection.” The color, the release continues, also helps peel “away layers of outmoded thinking,” “making room for innovation,” and, of course, reminds us that “true strength lies not just in doing, but also in being.” (It’s white.)
The choice was controversial in the banal way that everything is controversial now. Some people noted, pointing to the news, that this was maybe not the year to publish a press release about how awesome whiteness is, and some other people found that argument to be a very serious symptom of the woke mind virus. People took to Instagram to call the choice tone-deaf, or to label it trolling, or, in a few cases, to announce that they were “rejecting” Cloud Dancer, as though the color itself were an unsavory ideology and not a band of light visible to the human eye. Other people reacted to the reaction by suggesting that critics of Cloud Dancer were terminally offended hysterics looking for racism where absolutely none exists. Credulous news stories about the debate filled my feeds. I began to seriously worry that this frenetic society might not, in fact, rediscover the value of measured consideration and quiet reflection.
[Read: Rage bait is a brilliant word of the year]
White—like all colors, but maybe more than most—is loaded with meaning. Throughout history, it has carried with it commanding associations: with elitism, purity, nobility, wealth, moral superiority. (The architect Adolf Loos, in his seminal 1908 essay arguing that ornamentation was “degenerate,” hoped for a world where “the streets of the city will glisten like white walls.”) It is certainly not neutral, as Pantone has suggested in the Cloud Dancer rollout. If you ask a physicist, white isn’t even technically a color, because it does not exist on a single wavelength. The choice is strange by almost any measure. But then again, so is the concept of a color of the year.
As companies go, Pantone is an odd one. It does not sell paint, despite its association with paint swatches. It does not sell any of the machinery needed to make paint or produce fabric, either. It does not invent new colors, because that’s not (generally) possible. What it sells is a standard: For more than 60 years, it has categorized, named, and numbered more than 10,000 different shades, each rendered into format-specific formulas. The idea is that any designer in the world can be sure that the pinky purple in an ad on their computer screen will perfectly match the pinky purple that appears in the ad when it is printed in a magazine, and will perfectly match the pinky purple that appears on the packaging for the product the ad is for, because they are all Pantone 246 C. Much of Pantone’s business is selling color-swatch guides to designers, artists, and marketers to ensure this uniformity, which is hugely important to their jobs. The company is, in other words, in the intellectual-property business, and it has an effective monopoly over its particular field.
Pantone offers a genuine utility in the same way that the dictionary does. But it’s a fairly boring one, with a fairly limited audience. Over the years, the company has expanded its remit, finding new and impressionistic ways to sell color, and itself as the arbiter thereof. (“God created the world in seven days. And on the eighth day, he called Pantone to put color into it,” the company’s founder, Lawrence Herbert, once said.) In 1986, Pantone opened a consulting arm, through which its experts advise companies on how to use color in packaging and logos—a decade ago, it worked with Universal to develop and trademark Minion Yellow (13-0851 TCX). These days, the company also sells trend-forecast reports, and licenses its name and colors to other companies: You can now buy Pantone-branded sneakers, key chains, and mugs in its robust online store, and for a period of time in the 2010s, you could stay in a Pantone-branded hotel in Brussels.
[From the February 2025 issue: What not to wear: The false promise of seasonal-color analysis]
The most absurd invention, however, is the color of the year, which the company started announcing at the turn of the millennium, ostensibly to “draw attention to the relationship between culture and color,” though practically it just drew attention to Pantone. The annual color is apparently meant to reflect humanity’s deep yearnings—for “closeness and connection” (peach, 2024), or “a new narrative” (magenta, 2023)—but also to predict its future tastes. And the color’s very announcement has become a massive cultural and commercial occasion—a global news event created out of thin air, and a coup of publicity and corporate synergy unlike anything else I can think of. (Imagine Oxford University Press licensing its word of the year—incidentally, rage bait—for use in products.) The color of the year takes something available to everyone, in nature, and sells it back to us.
This year, the high-end hotel chain Mandarin Oriental is incorporating Cloud Dancer into its properties. The furniture company Joybird is making sofas in it. For the people who can’t stand to use off-trend Command hooks, 3M has unveiled a Cloud Dancer line, and for the serenity-seeking preschooler, Play-Doh has released a special edition of its signature Doh. The controversy has abated, but the stuff to buy will stick around.
