The Company That Invented the Color of the Year Says Every Color Has a Good Side, and You Have to Treat Them All Equally

The color of the year also sums up current events and the human mood. It is more a talking point than a rule.

Which color is beautiful? Which is ugly? For Pantone, the authority on color research, this is the one question everybody has an opinion about and nobody has a firm answer to.

It can at least tell you which color will be popular in 2017.

On December 8, the Pantone Color Institute announced its color of the year. The company, which advises many brands on color, says next year belongs to Greenery — a green that stands for everything coming back to life, for freshness and vitality.

Pantone has picked a color of the year since the turn of the century. Over 16 years, that color has often set the direction of fashion, moved interior-decorating trends, and changed food packaging and industrial design. Last year's pair — Rose Quartz and Serenity — set off a long argument on social media about blurred gender lines and equality.

"We look at influencers in a lot of countries, and especially at young people," Ron Potesky, Pantone's general manager and senior vice president, told QDaily. He admitted the company has long wondered whether social media would chip away at Pantone's authority: "On social media everyone is an expert. But on the other hand, the way people argue about the color of the year makes us an active part of the community."

So you see Pantone taking part in public affairs, weighing in on gender equality and on a turbulent world. Greenery, it says, is meant to "bring hope to all of us living in a disordered social and political environment."

Take Pantone's collaboration this June with the fashion designer Jason Wu — a gray named after him — which Ron called a "win-win." In the past, that treatment, a color certified by Pantone as yours alone, went only to big companies: Coca-Cola Red, Tiffany Blue.

Pantone's core business splits roughly three ways: selling color chips, selling color consulting, and licensing goods. Which is to say that this company devoted to studying color also has industries it works for. In the evidence Pantone offers for its color of the year, you can find its customers: the spring/summer collections from Gucci and Kenzo, a Tiffany chair, a Mercedes-Benz, Diana Vreeland perfume, Hermès bags, new makeup from Crave 4 Makeup.

In fact, Greenery had already turned up in plenty of places before Pantone announced it. Pantone did not manufacture the trend out of nothing. Some people therefore argue that Pantone simply reads the spirit of the age and "picks a color on humanity's behalf."

Another interesting thing about this company: Pantone has always said it treats every color alike, but the world does not.

"From a business standpoint, if you know the color of the year in advance, you can build the product early and get it on the shelf early," Ron Potesky said. He was not sure whether color's fate in business follows the 80/20 rule exactly, but a small group of colors is more popular every year, "especially in fashion — navy, black tones, white tones."

Others work the other way around. In 2012 the Australian federal government hired a research firm to find the color people hated most, which it planned to use on cigarette packs. Australians settled on a greenish dark brown: Pantone 448 C. But to Leatrice Eiseman, the "color expert," there is no such thing as the world's ugliest color: "Put it on a motorcycle or a bicycle and it looks beautiful, completely right."

Pantone sees its job as "educating" people in how to use color. On December 12 it came all the way to Shanghai to hold a talk promoting its business and its ideas about color.

Over a whole afternoon, Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, walked the room through next year's color trends. Her slides ran through image after image, each a clue, hinting at what would sell hard next spring and summer. Among the 200-odd people in the audience were reporters and dealers in Pantone color chips and licensed goods — and, in larger numbers, Pantone's Chinese customers.

QDaily talked with Lea and Ron before the talk began. To the end, neither would say which color they liked, and both kept repeating that Pantone never judges a color beautiful or ugly. But they did answer a few questions that had puzzled us for a long time:

How does Pantone pick a color of the year? What if Greenery doesn't suit me? What does a color expert actually do? And what does Pantone mean by treating all colors equally?

Q=Qdaily

L=Leatrice Eiseman

R=Ron Potesky

Q: How does Pantone settle on a color of the year?

L: We have a team that travels the world hunting for signals about which color will be popular. We study what a color means psychologically and logically, what people expect from a color emotionally, and how color helps meet people's needs.

The social function of color, and its reach worldwide, matter most of all.

We also watch the art world; film, which is a major entertainment industry; big sporting events, and where they are held. What colors are popular in the host cities? What do people's uniforms look like? Then we come back to fashion, and to makeup, where the trends turn over fastest.

There is also graphic design and packaging graphics around the world, and we study stage lighting. We study far too many things, including what unusual colors the leading figures in every industry plan to use. We gather all that information and data, and then we talk it over. That is usually the spring of the year before.

We start traveling in spring, looking for inspiration. By summer we start looking for what we call proof-points, comparing all those images. By late summer or early autumn we have a first answer.

Q: Pantone's colors of the year for the past two years seem tied to politics and world affairs. Why?

L: On the political side, many parts of the world are living with worry and unrest, so we offer a color that can improve things and carry a little of the idea of hope.

We do take it into account, though politics is not a core factor. But if people need it, Greenery might help — and most people these days probably need to relax a bit.

Q: You once said Rose Quartz would stay popular for at least two more years. So why do you think Greenery represents the future better than Rose Quartz does?

L: Our aim isn't necessarily to make it more popular. It's to offer an idea, to open a conversation about color.

Color gives off a lasting energy. It isn't that Serenity's life ends when this year ends. It's that people will start talking about Greenery, or perhaps wearing it with Rose Quartz and Serenity. That is our real aim: to keep a conversation about color going, and let people find new combinations for these colors.

Q: The tech industry seems to love black, white, and gray. Besides fabric, can Greenery catch on onscreen too?

L: Absolutely. If you read Pantone's explanation of Greenery, you'll see it is a very international color. People think of beautiful leaves, plants, forests — the places people like to visit. It stands for recovery, for spring, for the new plants and flowers born on this earth. A color like that, dropped into technology and the digital world, looks cutting edge.

It also grabs the eye fast. So in marketing, Greenery becomes a fine tool, because, you know, the customer's eye goes straight to it.

Q: How does Pantone name so many colors?

L: It's a challenge, but it's also fun. Nature offers plenty to work from — beautiful jade, flowers — but we avoid naming a color after a famous person. A few years ago, for instance, there was a children's show, and people called one purple Barney Purple. Barney was enormously popular with kids then, but you can't name a purple after Barney, because you never know when Barney will stop being popular.

Q: What if Asians can't pull off green?

L: Remember that the color of the year isn't only for fashion. It can go into accessory design, industrial design — cars, home design, gift design, many, many fields. You might choose not to wear it, but you may well carry a Greenery product home.

Another key point: say you feel green doesn't go with your skin tone. Put it next to rose tones and the two will set off your skin beautifully.

Nature holds so many greens, and we are offering only one reading of green. It may not be the most popular or the most widespread color right now, but we hope more people can use it flexibly.

Q: Why do we read different colors in so many different ways? Where does that come from?

L: Everyone carries certain feelings about color, and those feelings begin forming very early in childhood. Hand a child a box of markers or crayons and they will pick a few colors at once and start drawing. We all loved doing that as children.

As they grow up, their sense of subjective color (Subjective Color — Ed.: how each person perceives shifts in color and reads them) deepens. That is when we can step in and teach them the other meanings of color.

Q: What skills does it take to be a color expert?

L: One very important quality is objectivity. You have to peel your own taste away from your professional work. Even if you don't much like a color, you still have to weigh what the project as a whole needs.

That is the heart of color research: even when what you're judging is a color's emotional effect on people, you have to strip out emotion and look at it very objectively.

Q: Is there a color you hate?

L: No. That's like asking me to pick out a child I don't like.

Q: Ah, then can you pick out a child you do like?

That's funny! Because even if your child isn't good-looking, you'll still find every way you can to dress them up, to buy them nice clothes.

People believe such a thing exists, but I simply don't believe there is an ugly color in this world. And I'll tell you how to make it look good. Take a purple that's hard to match: put it on packaging, add a wine red, and the whole thing takes on an elegant undertone at once.

Q: As a color expert, do you have any occupational habits?

L: When I'm out walking around and I see a color, I think, "Oh, that's Pantone something-or-other C." I can't remember the exact number, of course, but once you've spent time with color chips you learn fast what things look like translated into Pantone-speak.

Q: Do your customers badly want to know next year's color in advance?

R: They do. From a business standpoint, if you know the color of the year, you can build the product early and get it on the shelf early. Customers always want us to tell them the color of the year ahead of time, and the color trend report too.

Q: Does the 80/20 rule apply to color as well?

R: That's an interesting question. We handle every kind of color chip, and every year — I'm not sure it's exactly 80/20 — there really are popular colors and unpopular ones, and which colors belong to which group keeps changing. I can't give you the exact ratio, but some colors really do stay popular forever, especially in fashion: navy, black tones, white tones have always been popular.