2025 Colour of the Year
Inadvertently, Pantone got the colour for 2025 — a basic waste-evocative brown — spot on. But its rationale is extraordinarily divorced from reality
Pantone has released its prediction for Colour of the Year 2025, and it’s an unremarkable mid-brown called Mocha Mousse. However, the announcement is worthy of further interrogation as this pick is purported to be a siren of the times. According to the Pantone Institute, it expresses “a global mood and an attitude, reflecting collective desire in the form of a single, distinct hue”.
Indeed, if the colour company was able to accurately predict the zeitgeist for the forthcoming year, this would be deeply interesting, regardless of any subjective feelings we may harbour about the shade itself.
Yet, before any chance for considered discussion, my in-box is already filled by over-eager PRs collating products that vaguely resemble the chosen hue to capitalise on their freshly stated trend-setting status. Brand collaborations are lined up well in advance too. This year, the newly titled lastminute.com London Eye, coloured itself brown for the launch, and Motorola gives us a shiny chocolate coloured phone. There’s a scent (blending cocoa bean, salted peanut and vanilla) and a vegan leather make-up bag up for grabs, alongside numerous other brownish things from companies I’ve never heard of.
The ink will no doubt still be wet on contracts for 2026 regardless of the next colour to come.
And I’d have no issue with any of this if Pantone could be more honest about its annual stunt. Imagine: “Here’s what we’ve picked, because we like it, and it’s different to last year, enjoy!” Every company has a marketing playbook. We can’t hold that against them.
But cloak the fanfare in soothsaying earnestness, such as Pantone Institute’s executive director Leatrice Eiseman, describing Mocha Mousse as “answering our desire for comfort”, and asserting that it “highlights the relationship between colour and culture”, and we are compelled to comment.
Thus, here are three threads that seem pertinent…
1. The Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and author Cory Doctorow recently coined the word “enshittification” to epitomise the mood of the moment. He defines it as “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of that service (especially of an online platform) as a consequence of profit-seeking.
2. According to the Netflix documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy, 13 million phones are thrown out every day; 400 million tonnes of plastic waste is created every year, and 190,000 garments produced every minute — Shein, the Chinese fast fashion megabrand is alleged to introduce 1.3 million new styles every single year. This is waste at epic proportions.
3. In popular psychology, comfort is the enemy of growth because it lulls you into a state of complacency and makes you believe that everything is under control. Embracing what is uncomfortable on the other hand, is a prerequisite for growth and learning.
Inadvertently then I’d say that Pantone got the colour for 2025 — a basic waste-evocative (aka poo) brown — spot on. But as per last year, the surrounding narrative is extraordinarily divorced from reality.
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