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As 2025's cultural retrospectives begin to trickle in (read: Spotify Wrapped or Oxford's word of the year), Pantone is not to be outdone.
The famed color factory on Thursday, Dec. 4, released its shade of the upcoming year, or perhaps more appropriately for 2026, its lack of shade. The company's Color Institute projected that the swatch most appropriate for next year is Cloud Dancer, described as "a billowy, balanced white imbued with a feeling of serenity."
Known to the other chips at Sherwin-Williams as Pantone 11-4201, to the untrained it looks, well, white. Lee Eiseman, Pantone's Color Institute's executive director, and VP Laurie Pressman beg to differ, though.
Their careers, steeped literally in color, are reduced once a year to a raised eyebrow as non-design professionals wonder why on earth that shade was crowned the winner. It's a painstaking and rather technical process, actually, that determines Pantone's hue of the moment. To humor us normies, though, Pressman and Eiseman admit that the color may look like plain white – but really, it's a message that the world needs a blank slate.
Cloud Dancer, a white that is both warm and cool, reflects an overwhelmed feeling among consumers as the world feels louder and technology, in particular AI, encroaches further into our lives.
People are "feeling bombarded," Pressman tells USA TODAY, and are looking for a "fresh start."
"If everyone's feeling this overload, there's something that's just not working right," she adds. "We want to be with things that are real, and (Cloud Dancer) goes very well with this nature-based feeling … honest beauty, no spectacles, no filters." That the color evokes looking up to the clouds on a clear day should feel like a return to form as the world spins madly on.
"It's not too cool, it's not too warm," Eiseman adds. "It's the kind of color that I can use with just about everything that I have in the room."
She isn't much bothered by the idea that people may say "it's just white" for her, any conversation about color is a win. And Cloud Dancer is a product of its epoch, just like every Pantone shade of the years that came before it.
"We have to look within the context of the time," she says. "Color is about context."
If that rings true, the next question might inevitably be – at an incredibly tense moment in the U.S., following accusations of white supremacy bleeding into advertisements and a rise of white nationalism in politics, are the folks at Pantone at all concerned about the message Cloud Dancer might be sending?
Not particularly, it seems.
"The Pantone Color of the Year selection process is driven by humanity and by the emotional resonance inherent in the color," Eiseman and Pressman said in a joint statement. "Cloud Dancer is a color that is about relaxation, reflection, and creativity – the color was selected by the global team at the Pantone Color Institute for its emotional and creative resonance, not as a stance on politics, ideology or race.
"Pantone does not assign or amplify political narratives to color, so selecting or avoiding a color solely on that basis would give those narratives a weight they don’t have in this process," they added.
Worth noting also is that Cloud Dancer is not a particularly solitary creature. It arrives arm in arm with a slate of accompanying palettes that help it shape-shift and showcase its "versatility." With names like Atmospheric, Tropical Tonalites and Powdered Pastels, the palettes offer a more robust vision of Pantone's approach to the shade.
"If you have a color that is more versatile, more accessible," Pressman says, "there (are) so many more different ways that I can put my own stamp on it."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Pantone unveils 2026 color of the year, and it may surprise you
Reporting by Anna Kaufman, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
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