Pantone Has Released Its Color of the Year & We All Hate It

As it likely did for many, if not most of you, Pantone's enthusiasm for unseasoned aesthetics has left me wrinkling my nose and side-eyeing them for a second year in a row.

Last year it was a deep beige.

Beige.

This year—a forlorn, greyish sweatsock white. Sure, to them that would be a sophomoric mischaracterization of what they're selling. A color that with their whole chests, they've dubbed "cloud dancer."

But that only makes it worse.

Can we just pause a moment on the name? Cloud Dancer is as cringe as a culturally-appropriated drum circle populated by non-indigenous white folk wearing MLM pyramid scheme essential oils. It's a name you'd pull out as a writer when you're trying to capture the essence of a thirsty, try-hard wellness guru character who won't get vaccinated because she doesn't want anything toxic in her body but smokes a metric shit ton of weed.

I'm not going to delve too deeply into the societal implications of a celebration of whiteness here. Okay, maybe a little bit, but in our current sociopolitical condition, you can find tons of more qualified people than myself that have already weighed-in online. But what I will say is that when the good folks at Pantone think this is a smart move in 2026, it signals less that we should all run out and buy clothing the color of a pair of dingy cotton underpants pulled from the dryer, and more that perhaps it's time for Pantone to fire its entire PR team and start from scratch.

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Why we're triggered by the Pantone color of the year

According to the Guardian, Pantone's VP Laurie Presssman has said that the color is "a structural color, allowing all colors to shine." It's a statement that, fittingly, reads like the product of the AI prompt, "write me a statement that effectively summarizes the modern fallacy of a level playing field for all."

The Guardian has paraphrased further statements by Pantone, calling Cloud Dancer a "sophisticated" color that is not "overstimulating", a claim that interestingly, sends me into the same sort of perimenopausal rage as a random misogynist telling me to "calm down." I decide what's overstimulating and what's not. Not you, me.

This lesson here, for me anyway, is one that my adult self keeps learning over and over again—particularly since the pandemic, and I do think it accounts for why we're all reacting to Cloud Dancer (gag) in a similar manner. It's not just that the systems and organizations that we have set in place for ourselves as a society are wilfully blind and numb to the experiences and desires of normal people, it's that they want to control said experiences. This of course is not new—but I think what we're all feeling is that this doesn't seem so much like Pantone trying to represent the zeitgeist as it does them trying to dictate it; what we want, what we should be—right down to the color of our garments, which in the coming year I guess are supposed to effectively be an underpants-colored extension of our collective winter of discontent.

It is a color that is in fact, the absence of color. A non-color to match our blank expressions as we all stare vacantly at our smartphones, desperate for stimulation while we wait for our underpants to come out of the dryer.

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