Pantone’s Color of the Year 2026: Cloud Dancer

Pantone has released its Color of the Year 2026. It’s a dove grey called Cloud Dancer.

For background: Pantone’s Color of the Year is a trend forecast, part cultural snapshot, part marketing engine, meant to influence everything from fashion and interiors to product design for the coming year.

Personally, I was stunned. I had not expected the colour of the year to be off-white. After 2024’s Peach Fuzz and 2025’s Mocha Mousse, this is the third “neutral” in a row. Are Pantone trying to lock us into the beigest timeline? And didn’t we just do dystopian duct tape grey in 2021?

Like many designers, I make it a sport to guess the colour of the year, and in the past, plenty of my guesses have come pretty close. This year, specifically, there was a strange consensus among designers everywhere: our collective money was on a deep, forest-leaning green or a phthalo green. Between current trends in fashion and interior design, and the fact that 2025 has been unusually dark-green-and-pink-coded for obvious Wicked reasons, we were confident.

Personally, I also see colours in the burgundy-to-plum range having a moment.

The “People’s Colour”

In response to Pantone’s yearly decree, art rebel Stuart Semple (whose “Freetone” project aims to challenge Pantone’s monopoly on colour-matching) collected mass data by asking internet users to vote for their own “real colour of the year.” He averaged all submissions into a single hue, a mauve he named Anarchic Venom. And since it falls somewhere between plum and pink, it seemingly kind of tracks as a serious alternative to dark green.

However, as anyone who remembers the “I mixed all my paints/nail polishes/scented candles together” era of 2010s YouTube knows, a muted purple is pretty much the inevitable result of averaging any crowd-sourced colour wheel. Mauve was coming no matter what year it was. So while the idea is fun, it doesn’t really tell us anything about 2026 specifically.

Rebelling against The Beige Timeline

All that said, Cloud Dancer feels… anticlimactic and cowardly rather than serene and innovative. Hilariously, the word “Pantonedeaf” is trending.

And judging by how quickly “alternative” colours of the year are popping up all over social media right now, I don’t think I’m the only one craving something with more personality. Maybe this will be the year people choose their own palette instead of following Pantone’s script.

Whether or not Cloud Dancer catches on, the rebellion colours are already here.