Hold me closer Cloud Dancer; Pantone’s colour of the year has been announced and it is… white. Well no, sorry, not white. Cloud Dancer. It’s a soft, billowing white. A shade that Pantone hopes “serves as a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society rediscovering the value of measured consideration and quiet reflection.”
It’s the first time since Pantone first started doing colour of the year in 1999 that the institute has ever gone with white, or more accurately, the absence of colour. While some may argue white is not a colour at all, it is in fact a colour that represents either the absence of all pigment or the combination of all wavelengths in the light spectrum, depending on whether you’re talking about colour as a physical presence or colour as light. It is, as Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Color Institute, says a “blank canvas”, which is a slightly harrowing concept for a world on the precipice of complete overhaul.
Pantone’s colour of the year is famously predictive and rooted in the state of society as a whole. 2016’s pick, Rose Quartz, went on to be literally everywhere and earn itself the moniker ‘millennial pink’ (a questionable style period we’re still trying to recover from). In 2023, Pantone chose Viva Magenta in an effort to reintroduce some vibrance and vigour into a world still trying to bounce back from Covid. 2025’s pick was the fervently faecal Mocha Mousse, an apt choice for a year that ended up being a total piece of shit.
What, pray tell, will Cloud Dancer have in store for us then? The Pantone Color Institute predicts it will offer a sense of “respite and relief from emotional and physical stimulation,” as if regular loads of laundry and purchasing industrial amounts of stain remover are a fast track to a life of abject peace.
The prospect of Cloud Dancer as an omen for a clean slate in 2026 is a little more promising. Perhaps what they’re trying to tell us, really, is that we’ll finally get to leave the dumpster fire of 2025 behind. The rapid deterioration of global geopolitics, the continued financial turmoil, and the rollercoaster of political leadership around the world will simply dance off into the clouds. We would, for just a moment, like the inside of our brains to be Cloud Dancer. To wipe it all clean like a whiteboard — sorry, a Cloud Dancer board.
Perhaps Cloud Dancer is a Dark Mirror-esque prediction for our state of mind by December 2026. When we’ve given in to the robots, let AI take over, and blissfully slipped into a state of collective unconsciousness. Maybe what they’re trying to tell us is that it’s time to finally give up. There’s no colour left. As we roll faster and faster into an uncertain future, simply lay down your swords and ask Chat GPT what to think. It’s easier that way.
