Paint the town peach fuzz, says Pantone

Peach fuzz is the Pantone colour of the year for 2024. (Photo by Cottonbro Studios via Pexels)

Pantone’s declaration of peach fuzz, described as “an appealing peach hue softly nestled between pink and orange”, as the colour of the year for 2024, raises the age-old question of how colours impact our lives. Feeling blue or feeling green or seeing red are all colloquialisms that bring to mind the close association between colour and human feelings. But how valid are such arbitrary proclamations?

Changing colours every year seems pretty wanton, and unprovoked. It reeks of the modern disease of Viktor Papanek’s planned obsolescence to create a false demand in the economy.

For the last two decades the Pantone Color Institute based in New Jersey, US, has provided annual colour prompts to industry to tweak merchandise colours in its bid to marry business and marketing in one fell swoop. This way the same product gets a new look just by an edict of announcing a new colour. How many people actually like the new colour and how many can afford to buy new products based just on colour, or how many companies can rejig products or even their social media pages or brochures, is questionable. Despite that, in this annual exercise, every time a colour is flipped out of reckoning, brands rush to change the colour of their products or background of logos. The world is held to ransom in this trend forecasting in one sense, because suddenly all colours except the chosen one stand invalidated.

Call it FOMO or the herd mentality, but we are so habituated and addicted to following the trending celebrity, style or meme that colour is also incorporated into this pantheon of cultural changes. The politics of fashion after all is built on the fulcrum of the ephemeral, the concept of the fashion du jour or seasons. Some fashions evaporate after the spring season and some vapourize after the fall. We have trends for not just paint colours but unspeakably even for painting styles for artists’ canvases. There is a mad rush to change home decors to fit in with international trends, be it the Eames chair or pastel minimalism. So don’t be surprised to see paintings in beatific peach fuzz staring down at us from trendy walls.

Colour psychologists at the interface of marketing have now classified colours not just according to national moods and aspirations but also under generational grids. Thanks to them, we now know that boomers prefer neutrals and millennials love pink and pop-neon energetic shades. How does a colour even represent national mood and a population’s predictive feelings about the economy? Pantone says each colour encapsulates the essence of the motivation of the consumer to consume. That seems like an arbitrary and unjustifiable spiel and an open secret that everyone is in on. It seems like a licentious contract between waste and libertine consumption.

While colours play an enormous and significant part in the perception and positioning of a product and people pay enormous sums of money to designers for choosing colours that represent the ethos of their product, changing colours every year seems pretty wanton, and unprovoked. It reeks of the modern disease of Viktor Papanek’s planned obsolescence to create a false demand in the economy. Fashion is the tool that is the prime mover where technology fails to provide change or an upgraded functional advantage.

Like mush internet content, these suggestions follow the nudge theory. They slowly slide into the consumer’s wishlist after marketeers present us with just that colour. Thus prompted, we dutifully repaint our houses and redo our wardrobes, with the more compliant among us falling over each other to have the same colour of socks or ties or nail paint. It’s a validated mugs game with willing participants.