Mama Don’t Take My Chromophobia Away

Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year is selling us a white fantasy.

By Lida Zeitlin-WuFebruary 4, 2026

• Art & Architecture

• Cultural Studies

WHITE REPELS. White attracts. White is muted. White is blinding. White is not a color. White is the combination of all colors. White is a racial descriptor that postures as the absence of race: a blank slate onto which difference can be projected, made visible, and felt.

These are just a few of the many paradoxes surrounding white, which has never—until now—been selected as international color corporation Pantone’s Color of the Year. The 2026 Color of the Year is officially designated as Cloud Dancer, “a lofty white whose aerated presence acts as a whisper of calm and peace in a noisy world.” Not unlike how print companies or bridal designers might name their lightest samples Linen, Ivory, or Eggshell, Pantone is careful to avoid “white” in the color’s name. Think of the scene in American Psycho (2000) where the most minute differences in the whites that executives have chosen for their business cards, from Bone to Pale Nimbus, become a way of measuring taste and status. But unlike hues named after material objects—it wasn’t so long ago that Ivory really was made from crushed ivory—Cloud Dancer doesn’t reference physical things so much as it does a lifestyle. “Choosing rest and consciously stepping away from relentless demands and turning inward recognizes that true strength lies not just in doing, but also in being,” gushed Pantone’s December 3 press release in the corporation’s signature saccharine-yet-blasé tone, as if a fortune cookie slip and a corporate training module had been fed to ChatGPT.

The Color of the Year, if you’ve managed to avoid the annual media blitz, is a newly named hue that Pantone releases each December. According to Vice President Laurie Pressman, the designation is meant to “capture the global zeitgeist”; for last year’s selection, Pantone wrote the yearly selections “express a global mood and an attitude, reflecting collective desire in the form of a single, distinct hue.” Prior to the Color of the Year’s popularization in the early years of Web 2.0, Pantone (meaning “all colors,” from the Greek pan and the English tone) was relatively unknown outside of industry circles. It was one of the earliest color-focused companies to anticipate the shift from print to digital color in the 1980s and social media in the early 2000s—a potential explanation for its present-day dominance. But the corporation has been around since the 1950s, when it started as a single division of a modest print shop in Carlstadt, New Jersey. As the story goes, CEO Lawrence Herbert, who sometimes goes by the hyperbolic moniker “The King of Color,” took over the company in 1962. The following year, he released the first version of the standardized Pantone Matching System (PMS), which provides design professionals with a “universal language of color.” Today, the company also offers color consulting services and manufactures instruments like the Pantone CAPSURE, which promises to match any scanned surface to a PMS color. As the device’s name implies, Pantone’s entire raison d’être is to convince us that one of the most notoriously subjective sensory qualities—color—is something that can be quantified and captured, swatch by swatch.

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With the Color of the Year, Pantone is selling color as a cultural and emotional commodity, not just as a digital or print-based tool. It does so through color forecasting, an enterprise that combs various creative spheres—like fashion, architecture, graphic design, and film—for emerging chromatic trends and capitalizes on them. Although color forecasting has been part of the modern fashion industry since its inception, the Color of the Year, which began in 1999, wouldn’t have exploded without the internet. Responding directly to the Y2K scare, Pantone promised that its inaugural “Color of the Millennium,” Cerulean, would “produc[e] the perfect calming effect” for a “stressful, high-tech era.” Framing the Color of the Year as an antidote to a chronically online outside world clearly isn’t new or novel for Pantone. Still, although no color exists in a vacuum, the most declaratively “neutral” shade—white—is ironically the least neutral of all.

Cloud Dancer’s implications of whiteness as part of an aspirational lifestyle inevitably raised alarm bells. Journalists and social media users were quick to zero in on the questionable optics of choosing white at this political moment, when white nationalism is essentially mainstream and ICE is openly abducting and murdering people in broad daylight. Some writers described Cloud Dancer as “tone-deaf.” There were more than a few KKK jokes, leading to parody memes like “Klantone” and “Klan Hood White.” One journalist suggested it was a recession indicator: could Cloud Dancer be somehow emblematic of the skyrocketing price of eggs (also white)? Others went further still, speculating that, far from being politically oblivious, the pale tint was actually rage-bait, designed to provoke strong negative reactions—and thus increased online engagement—from progressives. “Bitch, do you mean white?” comedian Amber Ruffin riffed on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “White’s the color of every year. White was the color of 1988. White was the color of 793 to 1066 AD” (cue image of Vikings).

Pantone, of course, has denied these allegations, instead relying on language so performatively apolitical that it has the opposite effect. Cloud Dancer, the corporation insists, has nothing to do with race. Instead, the pale tint “provid[es] a refuge of visual cleanliness that inspires well-being and lightness.” Based on what people are arguing online, Pantone is either: a) so naive that it can’t see the writing on the perennially blank wall, or b) intending the hue as a white supremacist dog whistle. But it’s the ambiguity between the two poles that’s key here. By leaning on Silicon Valley–adjacent buzzwords like “focus,” “calm,” and “innovation,” Pantone is banking on the widely accepted notion that certain colors possess soothing or pacifying properties. This universalizing approach to color, the corporation hopes, will give it a pass, allowing it to brush aside any meaningful critique. The uncomfortable blurring of aesthetic and racialized whiteness—which have never been and can never be separated—is precisely the point.

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As the self-described “gold standard of color,” Pantone is a prime example of how color in the 21st century has become increasingly privatized. In 2022, Pantone paywalled PMS colors in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, causing files to fade to black overnight if users didn’t subscribe to a new plug-in. Stuart Semple, the cheeky British artist best known for his ongoing public feud with sculptor and installation artist Anish Kapoor over the latter’s exclusive rights to use the highly light-absorbing pigment Vantablack, calls this phenomenon “Big Colour.” Big Color, with its parallels to Big Tech, highlights the increasing difficulty of opting out of color systems copyrighted by corporations like Pantone and Adobe. Yet despite its emphasis on innovation, Pantone is not inventing new colors or materials when it releases “new” colors; rather, the company is subdividing the spectrum into discrete swatches to be added to its infinitely growing database. This is distinct from, say, Vantablack, with its dense carbon nanotube structure, or “olo,” a color developed last spring by scientists at UC Berkeley that can only be seen by stimulating the eye with lasers. Pantone, as Semple lampoons via projects like his crowd-sourced “The People’s Colour of the Year,” exemplifies the late-capitalist dream of monetizing something as ephemeral as color itself.

There’s a great deal of lore surrounding the Color of the Year selection process—a mystique Pantone deliberately cultivates. In 2012, a Slate journalist went “undercover” and described a top secret meeting at the company where a team of mostly anonymous color experts (one of whom is always Executive Director Leatrice Eiseman) hole up in a room somewhere in Europe until they’ve narrowed down several hundred colors to just one. Importantly, this room’s walls are white to avoid visual distraction. The white cube galleryesque setup supports the idea that white is the absence of color and would naturally be excluded from the Color of the Year. But with Cloud Dancer, it seems, the background has become the foreground.

Eiseman has since said that there’s no longer a single meeting to decide on the Color of the Year, but she remains deliberately vague about how it’s chosen. Sometimes called the “international color guru” because of her quasi-mystical approach to color forecasting, Eiseman has spearheaded the Color of the Year since the very beginning. As she writes in one of her books, The Complete Color Harmony (2017), colors possess distinct psychological properties because of “ancient and universal associations.” Still, the Color of the Year selection process is less mysterious than Eiseman’s New Agey language would lead us to believe. Collaborating with Pantone, even unofficially, is a lucrative source of cultural capital and a way of getting eyeballs on content. When I opened Spotify last month, I noticed a new Pantone-sponsored playlist tailored to my personal algorithm, featuring songs with “bright, light, soft, and clear” vibes. Other multisensory corporate partnerships for Cloud Dancer include one with Play-Doh, “because sometimes the best play starts with a blank canvas,” and another with smart fragrance diffuser brand Pura, which reimagines Cloud Dancer “not just as something you see, but something you feel and breathe.”

The Color of the Year is far from a magical oracle: it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet it’s by no means an isolated phenomenon: it also builds on a much longer history of color’s absorption into self-help culture, or what sociologist Eva Illouz calls emotional capitalism. We often take for granted that our favorite colors say something about who we are as individuals, or that customizing our homes with ambient paint and lighting schemes will create a calming and personalized atmosphere. But as I’ve written elsewhere, “color psychology” as we know it today only became mainstream in the post–World War II era, the very same moment Pantone emerged on the scene. Between the 1940s and ’60s, companies reimagined color as a therapeutic tool to be sold to primarily white, middle-class, female consumers to realize their domestic dreams via new interiors, cosmetics, or kitchen appliances.

All this to say is that, with the Color of the Year, Pantone isn’t selling us color per se. It’s selling us the fantasy of a stable and immaculately curated good life—the promise that if we surround ourselves with the “right” colors, we’ll achieve some form of serenity. If there’s something to the recession hypothesis behind Cloud Dancer, it’s that in the face of a precarious and increasingly fascist political reality, Pantone repackages color to consumers as a depoliticized mood, aesthetic, and vibe. It tries to sell ourselves to ourselves.

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What makes whiteness so slippery? It has chameleonlike qualities—the ability to skirt the edges of perception, to oscillate between presence and absence. In color systems designed for print like CMYK, where colored inks overlap to produce black, white is akin to an empty canvas. But in a system designed for electronic screens like RGB, colored lights combine to create a high-intensity, pure white. As film scholar Richard Dyer wrote nearly 30 years ago in White (1997), there’s a deeply entrenched visual affinity between white people and light partly due to white’s unique perceptual properties. From the ethereal sunbeams illuminating the subject of a Vermeer painting to the “glow” of classic Hollywood starlets like Grace Kelly, whiteness is tied to aesthetic and moral traits like translucence, cleanliness, and virtue, many of which are rooted in Judeo-Christian mythology.

This recurring fear or aversion to color in Western visual culture sometimes goes by the term chromophobia. Chromophobia is a pervasive ideology in Euro-American aesthetics—a fetishism even—that color is something that can be purged or imagined away. For instance, even though it turns out that most ancient Greek and Roman statues were actually vividly painted, the myth of their colorlessness has persisted and even supported a white supremacist fantasy of the untainted racial purity of Western civilization. Especially in the context of US history and politics, there’s no separating the purging of color from race. Racist historical metaphors like the “one-drop rule” imagined Blackness as akin to a dye soiling a white (a.k.a. “colorless”) cloth.

In his 1881 essay “The Color Line,” abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass wondered what it was about color that evoked such fear and hatred. In an evocative and poetic section, he paints a damning portrait of white supremacy as an unachievable aesthetic fantasy. This fantasy is a barren landscape stripped of all pigmentation:

If the white man were really so constituted that color were, in itself, a torment to him, this grand old earth of ours would be no place for him. […] He would require a colorless world to live in—a world where flowers, fields, and floods should all be of snowy whiteness; where rivers, lakes, and oceans should all be white; where islands, capes, and continents should all be white; where all the men, and women, and children should be white; where all the fish of the sea, all the birds of the air, all the “cattle upon a thousand hills,” should be white; where the heavens above and the earth beneath should be white, and where day and night should not be divided by light and darkness, but the world should be one eternal scene of light. In such a white world, the entrance of a black man would be hailed with joy by the inhabitants. Anybody or anything would be welcome that would break the oppressive and tormenting monotony of the all-prevailing white.

The dominant racial metaphor of the 19th and early 20th century, as Douglass articulates, was the color line, a hard continuum between black and white. By the 1980s and 1990s, the color line had been replaced by the more cheerful rainbow, a metaphor that lasted through the 2016 presidential election and Black Lives Matter. For brands such as Benetton, Crayola, and, of course, Pantone, diversity became a branding strategy. Turning to the rainbow was a way of celebrating an allegedly “post-racial” or “colorblind” society despite the persistence of structural inequities. In 2012, Pantone released a short and cringeworthy promotional video for the SkinTone Guide, “110 colors celebrating the beauty of skin.” The video is a montage of a group of visibly racially “diverse” people, unclothed and cropped from the shoulders up to emphasize their skin tones. “I am not Black,” “I am not White,” “I am not Red,” “I am not Yellow,” they say one by one. In unison, they conclude: “I am a person of color. We are all people of color.” The video ends with the slogan “Pantone: What color are you?”

This video has aged poorly, and Pantone has since moved away from any references to race or identity politics in its marketing, even though you can still buy the SkinTone Guide. So it’s not surprising that, since facing backlash for Cloud Dancer, Pantone has been adamant that the most recent Colors of the Year, including 2025’s Mocha Mousse and 2024’s Peach Fuzz (which looks an awful lot like the infamous “flesh” Crayola crayon), have had nothing whatsoever to do with complexion or race. “Skin tones did not factor into this at all,” Pressman said. “[F]or us it’s really about, at such a basic level, what are people looking for that color can hope to answer?”

But just a few years ago, after George Floyd’s murder and the COVID-19 outbreak, Pantone broke with its typically opaque, apolitical language in its Color of the Year announcements. In 2021, the duo of Ultimate Gray and Illuminating promised resilience and the hope that “everything is going to get brighter,” while 2022’s Very Peri acknowledged that we were coming out of “an intense period of isolation.” The press release for 2023’s Viva Magenta even explicitly mentioned the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, social unrest, economic instability, supply chain breakdowns, and climate change, claiming that the color offered “the assurance and motivation we need to weather long-term disruptive events.” Pantone may well have been merely virtue signaling for the past few years, a theory that’s supported by the fact that it dropped all pretenses of social justice just as DEI came under attack. But even if Pantone’s previous wording was hardly radical, Cloud Dancer holds up a reactionary mirror to our current authoritarian times. “It used to be more Hillary Clinton–neoliberal,” fumed my friend in Minneapolis, for whom the past month’s horrific events have hit especially hard. “This is tradwife!”

To borrow Pressman’s language, then, what is it that people are hoping color will answer? Obviously, that depends on who the people in question are. The MAGA crowd wants a license to decry “wokeness,” to receive confirmation that the sanctity of whiteness and traditional gender roles must be defended at all costs. I’m not suggesting that Pantone and its executives are Trump supporters or overt racists. But Cloud Dancer is, however you want to look at it, flirting with fascist aesthetics. Its surrounding rhetoric is reminiscent of Sydney Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle denim ad from last year, with its tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The original video has since been removed from American Eagle’s social media channels. Still, it’s hard to believe that hiring a blonde, blue-eyed, thin-yet-curvaceous white woman for a campaign that puns “jeans” with “genes” was accidental. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” Sweeney whispers. “My jeans are blue.”

Sweeney, who was a registered Republican in Florida as of June 2024, has become somewhat of a darling of the MAGA movement in no small part due to her unapologetic adherence to conventional beauty standards. The women in Donald Trump’s inner circle, including Kristi Noem, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and, of course, Melania Trump, have a distinctly exaggerated look that some have dubbed “Mar-a-Lago Face”: plastic surgery, veneers, heavy makeup, and long, voluminous hair—all of which extol white femininity as desirable and righteous. (And is it a coincidence that the promotional imagery for the just-released Melania documentary is predominantly white?) Not dissimilarly to American Eagle, using the vocabulary of purity and neutrality to describe Cloud Dancer allows Pantone to maintain its innocence even as these terms evoke the sinister history of eugenics. This isn’t “shockvertising,” where companies use overtly taboo imagery to grab attention, but something more subtle and insidious. The 2026 Color of the Year supposedly represents a “fresh start,” but it looks a lot like accepting the status quo. Cloud Dancer embodies ethereality, lightness, and the fantasy of opting out of an unendurable present-day reality—by floating above it all.

Has something so weightless ever been so loaded?

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Featured promotional image by Pantone.