When the colour specialists at Pantone introduced Cloud Dancer as their 2026 Coloration of the Yr, they predicted the shade would encourage a sort of cool calm.
However the alternative of Cloud Dancer, which Pantone described as a “billowy” white, has as a substitute sparked heated controversy.
Folks on-line have blasted the shade for being “bleak” and “boring” and probably not a colour in any respect. After listening to the outline of the colour learn throughout TODAY’s Dec. 4 unveiling, Al Roker retorted “in any other case generally known as white.”
Others have denounced Cloud Dancer as tone deaf and “white washing,” expressing different controversial takes.
Learn on to study all concerning the controversy over Pantone’s 2026 Coloration of the Yr.
What Is the Pantone Coloration of the Yr?
The Pantone Coloration Institute has been selecting an annual colour of the 12 months since late 1999 when it deemed Cerulean Blue 2000’s Coloration of the Yr, WWD reported. It known as the delicate blue shade the “Coloration of the Millennium” and stated it impressed hope.
The institute’s colour specialists “comb the world searching for new colour influences” to decide on its star shade every year, in accordance with Pantone’s web site.
Annually’s colour is influenced by all the pieces from motion pictures and trend to artwork and journey locations, and extra. Colours are additionally impressed by way of life traits, new applied sciences, sports activities and socio-economic situations.
Moreover, a Pantone spokesperson tells TODAY.com, “The Pantone Coloration of the Yr choice course of is pushed by the colour/colours which might be effervescent up throughout design and tying this to the zeitgeist. The emotional resonance inherent within the colour is vital to the choice course of.”
Different corporations like Benjamin Moore and WGSN additionally select an annual colour of the 12 months. The paint firm selected Silhouette AF-655, a “luxurious burnt umber with delicate notes of charcoal” as its 2026 colour. WGSN opted for Transformative Teal, the colour “for a interval of change and redirection.”
What Is Pantone’s 2026 Coloration of the Yr?
When Pantone introduced Cloud Dancer as its 2026 choose, it described the colour as “a billowy, balanced white” that’s “imbued with a sense of serenity.”
Like a clean slate, the “ethereal” Cloud Dancer is an emblem of a “calming affect in a frenetic society” and signifies our need to make a contemporary begin, the corporate said.
The colour additionally hints at “our seek for steadiness between our digital future and our primal want for human connection,” stated Laurie Pressman, the Pantone Coloration Institute’s vp.
Why Is the Selection Controversial?
Although Pantone described Cloud Dancer as a serene colour, it impressed a red-hot response after it was chosen as 2026’s Coloration of the Yr.
Whereas some individuals — together with marriage ceremony planners on TikTok — celebrated the selection, many others discovered Cloud Dancer oddly bleak, or worse.
“Your alternative is about as impressed as mayonnaise,” one individual wrote subsequent to Pantone’s announcement about Cloud Dancer on Instagram.
“Pantonedeaf,” one other added, whereas one individual commented, “It appears as if this choice, and the content material created round it, was conceived in a vacuum fully faraway from our collective social and political current. I’d hope a model that has this a lot cultural impression wouldn’t function with such a obtrusive blind spot.”
“It’s giving unseasoned hen,” jabbed one other.
When a Washington Submit reporter requested for suggestions about Cloud Dancer in a TikTok video, customers did not maintain again.
One individual known as the colour “bleak” and “dystopian,” writing, “The colour of the 12 months is not any colour. Simply one other instance of the life being sucked out of us all.”
One other stated its “lack of colour” was a “recession indicator,” joking, “Pantone can’t afford colour this 12 months and neither can anybody else.”
With headlines all 12 months reporting on the rise of white nationalism in the US, many critics noticed the selection of Cloud Dancer as both “tone deaf” or biased.
“SO… you all sat down and had some conferences. Rolled round some concepts. And in all these conferences, not a single one in all you… on this second the place white supremacy is within the information on a regular basis…. thought, ‘perhaps now isn’t the best time for this,’” one individual wrote on Pantone’s Instagram.
“Was ‘klanrobe white’ taken?” added another person.
How Has Pantone Responded to the Controversy?
Pressman addressed hypothesis that proclaiming white the colour of the 12 months might increase some eyebrows in an interview with Washington Submit.
“Pores and skin tones didn’t issue into this in any respect,” Pressman stated, noting Pantone has been requested related questions prior to now about different colour picks. “With Peach Fuzz after which with Mocha Mousse, individuals had been weighing in and asking if this was about pores and skin tones. And I believe we had been going, ‘Wow, actually?’ As a result of for us it’s actually about, at such a fundamental degree, what are individuals searching for that colour can hope to reply?”
Throughout a Dec. 4 launch occasion, Pantone’s president, Sky Kelley, stated she knew Cloud Dancer can be a “fairly controversial” alternative.
Pantone’s choose, she stated in a speech caught on video by CNET, “sparks a dialog about colour that everybody can take part in.”
She added, “At Pantone, we don’t dictate that dialog, we facilitate it.”
In an announcement to TODAY.com, a Pantone spokesperson additionally defined the that means behind the colour’s title.
“Cloud Dancer visually represents an area to create, like a clean web page prepared so that you can flip your inspiration into actuality,” the spokesperson stated, partly. “It provides us the power to turn into receptive each to what may be and what’s forward as Cloud Dancer suggests the internal peace we really feel after clearing the noise round us.”
Explaining that the title performs a serious position to “conjure up a sense,” the spokesperson stated that Cloud Dancer “displays a universally shared expertise: wherever we’re on this planet, all of us look as much as the buoyant clouds for inspiration, marvel, and to spark creativeness.”
Including, “Within the easy act of wanting up, we’re linked by the drifting lightness of clouds. That universality is a large a part of why Cloud Dancer was chosen because the Pantone Coloration of the Yr 2026.”