Elizabeth Goodspeed on why brown feels so beige

What do a cardboard box, a flooded country road, and an unpleasant smear on the bottom of your shoe have in common? They’re all the colour of the moment – at least according to Pantone, whose 2025 pick for Colour of the Year, Mocha Mousse, asks us to “find luxury” in brown. But what can brown actually do for you?

Colour has always been a commodity. Before synthetic dyes, pigments like lapis blue and crimson red were prohibitively expensive, derived from labour-intensive processes like the mixing of minerals or the crushing of insects. By the mid-19th century, industrialisation flooded the market with cheap, chemically-derived pigments, thereby stripping bright colours of their high status. The wealthy, seeking to distance themselves from these “vulgar” hues, embraced muted tones like black, beige, and brown as markers of sophistication. Mocha Mousse fits squarely into this lineage. The warm, non-controversial brown, marketed as “indulgent” and “delectable,” evokes the understated wealth of a Waldorf School or a cashmere sweater from The Row. But brown is more multifaceted than that. It’s also the colour of leaves and skin, of clay and bugs and rotting things. As Vivian Chen noted in her recent newsletter about Pantone’s selection – which she describes as just another version of “sad beige” – this shade of brown could have represented more progressive values like nature or interpersonal connection. Instead, it plays into consumerist ideals and the aesthetics of a privileged, minimalist life. Even the most mundane things can be rebranded as aspirational if the marketing is persuasive enough.

Brands have always understood colour’s ability to carry meaning; Tiffany Blue (PMS 1837 C) turns a paper box into a marker of exclusivity while Cadbury Purple (PMS 2685 C) communicates heritage and opulence. Pop culture has only amplified the role of colour as a shorthand for identity and value systems in recent years – just think of the hold that Barbie Pink (PMS 219 C) had on 2023, not just because of nostalgia and trendy coquettism, but because of how it redefined pink as a colour that could sell empowerment as easily as it sold dolls. The marketing campaign for Wicked this year has taken the same tack as Barbie (unhinged interview circuit aside) by attempting to turn the pairing of Glinda’s pink and Elphaba’s green into neatly packaged shareable content. Both Barbie and Wicked capitalised on colour’s ability to drive partnerships and merchandise; collaborating brands simply had to produce products in the associated colours, regardless of whether they reflected any integral narrative to the film’s plots themselves. See: pink and green Wicked luggage, pink and green Wicked Crocs, or pink and green “magic” Wicked mac and cheese. And yet, Wicked itself remains visually dull compared to its predecessors like The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz, which embraced bold technicolour palettes.

I’d be remiss to summarise 2024 in colour without mentioning Brat Green, the acid lime shade from Charli XCX’s album that became a viral sensation this summer. Unlike Barbie Pink or Wicked’s pink-and-green, Brat Green wasn’t driven by a top-down corporate push. Instead, it gained grassroots momentum through Charli’s fans – savvy, hyper-online Millennials and Gen Zers – who remixed and amplified it into a full-blown aesthetic. Businesses (and politicians) quickly latched onto the commercial power of the hue regardless, with cafes offering Brat-themed matcha drinks and merch sellers worldwide branding Arial-clad lighters and tote bags in the colour.

Brat Green exemplifies the modern power of colour as meme: hues amplified through collective participation that become a shared language for identity and consumption. Colour has never been more accessible – or more powerful. What once required niche expertise and materials to create is now available to anyone with a screen. In the digital age, colour is the easiest way to transform the surface of something without having to really change anything about it; it requires no considering for form or meaning, and certainly no design knowledge, just an eyedropper tool.

Colour wasn’t always this democratised. It used to be a tool reserved for creatives, not consumers, with corporations like Pantone serving as gatekeepers – ensuring colour remained the domain of the professional class. Pantone books have always carried a certain mystique for designers, a fetish object you hear about long before you actually need one, almost like a colour bible. As a student, I wasn’t working on the kind of large-scale offset printing projects that required Pantone’s precision, but I still had classmates who owned Pantone mugs and tote bags that turned the brand’s iconic chips into an inside joke. When I finally bought my own Pantone books six months into freelancing, it felt like a rite of passage: proof I’d “made it”, or at least had the tools to fake it. The experience was equal parts thrilling and absurd – $800 for colour chips that Pantone insists you replace annually because “the colours fade” (spoiler: no one does this). Yet, I’ll admit there’s undeniable satisfaction in flipping through the pages of pure perforated colour to match something I’ve so far only seen on screen. It’s tactile, precise, and entirely unlike anything a digital interface can replicate.

In theory, Pantone’s appeal has always been this practicality. A Pantone chip ensures the green on a perfume label made in Tokyo looks the same as one made in Paris. But today, many designers don’t rely on Pantone colours – or print at all. Instead, they’re working digitally, where colours live as blessedly non-proprietary hex codes. Even Adobe ended its partnership with Pantone in 2022, meaning designers can no longer easily utilise Pantone colours within the profession’s main print production software.

Despite this diminished functionality, Pantone’s cultural influence seems to have only expanded. The Colour of the Year is proof: it gets press (case in point), spawns memes, and drives engagement. But does it matter to designers? Not really. I don’t know anyone choosing Mocha Mousse because Pantone declared it trendy. Graphic design is about responding to briefs and solving problems, not chasing yearly predictions. The Colour of the Year is really for everyone but designers; a marketing spectacle aimed at fashion brands, influencers, and anyone eager to appear “on trend”.

The real secret is that trends don’t predict the future – they create it. When Pantone names Mocha Mousse its Colour of the Year, the machine is already in motion: partnerships bake the shade into product lines long before the announcement, and editorials carefully curate examples to make the colour feel inevitable. By the time you hear about a trend, it’s already being sold to you.

Historically, styles were labeled retroactively – Art Deco, for example, was called “Style Moderne” during its heyday, and Impressionism was a term of derision before it became an identifier. Social media has flipped this dynamic. Platforms like TikTok now drive naming micro-trends in real time, giving shape to what was previously diffuse and turning scattered preferences into a cohesive (and marketable) idea. A term like “Tomato Girl” creates a lens for viewing the world, encouraging people to adopt and expand the trend, whether by buying tomato-red dresses or posting Mediterranean-inspired selfies. Many of these modern micro-aesthetics are anchored in a single dominant colour – Tomato Girl is red, Vanilla Girl is white, Blueberry Girl is blue – distilling identity into something as simple as a palette. Unlike earlier personal styles like punk or indie twee, which demanded a point of view and subcultural references, these aesthetics require little more than a willingness to buy the right products in the right colour.

Mocha Mousse follows the same playbook, wrapping an ordinary colour in an aspirational name that reshapes how we perceive it. Pantone’s use of AI-generated imagery in the Mocha Mousse launch video highlights just how performative the trend-spotting economy has become. Pantone didn’t need to find real-world examples to justify the coming popularity of their Colour of the Year – they could just use AI to create cozy interiors, cafes, and polished wood finishes bathed in its warm tone. If you can’t find proof of a trend in the wild, why not generate it yourself?

This cyclical process reminds me of TikTok’s “Color Walks,” where participants pick a hue and let it guide their path – spotting a red flower, heading toward a red building, a red car, a red sign, and so on. These walks demonstrate how focus dictates perception: we find what we’re primed to look for. The Colour of the Year works the same way, steering industries and consumers to use, notice, and buy its chosen shade. Perception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But is that creativity, or just marketing? The question isn’t whether trends guide us, but how much power we give them. Maybe it’s time to stop letting Pantone tell us where to look.