The Color Recession May Be Permanent - The Atlantic

When Bob Buckter, a 79-year-old housepainter who also goes by “Dr. Color,” began his career, in the 1970s, the job was a lot more fun. Acid-tripping hippies in his hometown of San Francisco wanted “wild-ass color combinations” for their facades, he told me. Armed with mustard-yellow, lime-green, and vermilion paint, Buckter happily transformed drab Victorian and Edwardian homes into vivid eye candy.<br>Today, almost no one seems to be looking to the hues of jelly beans for inspiration for their home—or car or couch or fridge or practically anything else. Since the late 2000s, Buckter has watched with dismay as essentially colorless colors—think white, beige, gray—have taken over. “It’s not even three shades, or four shades, of gray. It’s just one dark gray,” he said. “It’s an ignorant way to paint your house.” A study of homes in Washington, D.C., last year found a similarly sharp rise in the number of gray homes, especially in the most rapidly gentrifying wards.<br>Color trends used to come and go. But the color recession that began early this century has dragged on far longer than the heyday of avocado green in the 1960s or hot pink in the 1980s. “Our top color from 2000 to 2010 was ‘Pelham Beige.’ We thought that would never change,” Sue Wadden, the director of color marketing at the paint company Sherwin-Williams, told me. The next decade, she said, “gray was dominant. Like gray, gray, more gray.” Sherwin-Williams’s current list of its most popular colors for home interiors features “Ice Cube” and “Crushed Ice” (both white), and “Agreeable Gray” and “Passive” (both gray). Colors are now getting warmer again, Wadden noted hopefully, but they’re “warmer whites.” The company’s color of 2026 is “Universal Khaki”—otherwise known, unfortunately, as “greige.”<br>The color drought doesn’t affect just paint companies. According to Pantone, a color-technology company influential among designers and manufacturers across industries, 2026’s “Color of the Year” is “Cloud Dancer” (yes, white).<br>Read: The color of the year is an exercise in absurdity<br>The share of new cars in grayscale colors rose from 60 percent in 2004 to 80 percent in 2023. Production of purple cars dropped 93 percent over that period, gold by 97 percent. “I don’t know how many different variants of silver and gray there could possibly be, but I think BMW and Mercedes have discovered it,” Karl Brauer, the analyst behind the report, told me.<br>Some color trends may look like a matter of whim. In the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, the imperious fashion editor Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep) delivered the now-famous monologue in which she berates her assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) for being “blithely unaware” of how her own cerulean-blue sweater was in fact a product of a high-fashion embrace of the hue “by the people in this room.” Twenty years on, in this year’s The Devil Wears Prada 2, Sachs is gently discouraged from wearing anything colorful. “This is quiet luxury,” Stanley Tucci’s Nigel Kipling explains while assembling a wardrobe of grays and taupes. “That,” he adds, gesturing at the pink garment in her hands, “is like a screaming guitar solo.”<br>What’s plain, in the Prada sequel and nearly everywhere else, is that color fads are no longer dictated from on high by style gurus. Remarkably, shoppers’ personal taste may not be much of a factor, either. Although some studies show that people tend to feel more cheerful in the company of oranges and yellows, more calm among blues and greens, and sometimes more depressed around too much gray, their spending habits say otherwise. Two decades into the color recession, the observable preferences of landlords, homeowners, car buyers, and consumers have grown detached from what people claim to like. And little evidence indicates that walls or cars or appliances in hues other than greige are coming back anytime soon.<br>For thousands of years, color was an aristocratic luxury. From the 14th century B.C.E. to the 15th century C.E., only Mediterranean royalty, priests, and nobles wore anything dyed Tyrian purple, because acquiring the color could involve slicing out the mucous glands of special sea snails, fermenting them in salt for days, boiling them for days more, and then pouring urine on newly dyed garments to bind the color to the fabric. (A single gram of the dye required at least 10,000 snails.) The deep red of kermes crimson in ancient Rome involved grinding dried female kermes insect corpses. By the Middle Ages, some landlords accepted the dye as rent. The lurid verdigris that adorns the dining-room walls of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate was a labor-intensive status symbol, achieved by oxidizing copper plates with vinegar vapors and then mixing the resulting patina with oil.<br>In 1856, after an 18-year-old English chemistry student named William Henry Perkin accidentally invented synthetic dye while trying to cure malaria, a range of...