The next wave of Colors

Are you curious yellow? Not so much?

OK, how do you feel about purple?

Two leading color industry advisory groups have predicted that these trendy hues will be the hottest colors of 2009. Pantone touts “mimosa,” a vibrant shade of yellow illustrated by the flowers of some mimosa trees (as well as the brunch-favorite cocktail), as its top shade of the new year. Meanwhile, the Color Marketing Group trumpets purple as 2009’s “must have” color.

Pantone, a provider of professional color standards for the design industries with its own line of 3,000 paint shades, picks a single color annually. Color Marketing Group, an international association of color design professionals, selects a broad palette of new hues. In addition to purple, its choices include “bright vivid yellow” (mimosa by another name?) and, arrggh, mauve, the all-time favorite of grannies everywhere.

“We’re finding comfort in colors that are familiar, and yet, at the same time, we’re embracing colors that make us happy,” says Jaime Stephens, executive director of CMG, whose members choose colors for everything from Cadillacs to Kleenex boxes. “Everyone’s concerned about the economy, yet the spirit of the country coming together after the election is powerfully reflected in these choices.”

Pantone has a similar pulling-ourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps spin behind mimosa and other reassuring tones of yellow it expects the populace to embrace in everything from paints to housewares and fashion.

“I think it’s just the most wonderful symbolic color of the future,” Pantone Color Institute executive director Leatrice Eiseman says. “It’s invariably connected to warmth, sunshine and cheer —- all the good things we’re in dire need of right now.”

While there’s hard science behind how people respond to various hues, there’s also an art involved in these yearly color pronouncements —- the art of the sell, that is. Just as country music’s countless award shows are, bottom line, all about boosting Music Row’s bottom line, annual color picks generate media coverage aimed at getting consumers thinking: “Hmm, what if I painted the rec room a fresh new color like, I dunno … mimosa.”

Color them skeptical

But not everyone’s buying what the prognosticators are selling. “Well, color me nauseated,” Gary Rotstein wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about Pantone’s pick, shredding the choice as gratingly smiley-faced.

“It’s possible we shouldn’t rush to judgment against mimosa,” he wrote. “After all, we had such high hopes for blue iris, Pantone’s color of the year for 2008, and look what it brought us: economic collapse, corporate bailouts, global terrorism… .”

Two Atlanta design experts are more polite about Pantone’s and CMG’s honorees, if ultimately dismissive.

“I don’t follow color predictions, and I honestly don’t know of anyone who really does,” says Jennifer Boles Dwyer of interior design blog the Peak of Chic (thepeakof chic.blogspot.com).

“Color is one of those topics that seems to elicit strong responses,” she continues. “Each of us has our favorites that we go to again and again —- colors that make us happy, colors that calm us, colors that just always seem right. And, of course, each of us has a color or two that we seem to dislike. That said, I think that we can’t help but be influenced by trends.”

Mimosa “sounds interesting” to Dwyer, who allows she’s “not a big fan of purple.” She says she currently “craves” moss green, aubergine (the one purple shade she likes) and murky blues —- “and if they’re rendered in a glossy, lacquered finish, all the better.”

The ascendancy of purple and mimosa doesn’t much register on the radar of Jimmy Stanton, an interior designer and owner of the decor store Stanton Home Furnishings in the Edgewood shopping district. “Especially with upholstery, I try to keep the colors neutral and bring in pops of color on pillows and accessories,” Stanton says. “I personally tend to go more toward earth tones.”

Seeking green with colors

Some paint companies also view the turn of the new year as a perfect marketing opportunity, and roll out a full slate of fresh colors.

Sherwin-Williams has just unveiled its 2009 Lifestyle Collection, which a company release claims was influenced by everything “from consumer electronics to international street style.” The Lifestyle Collection divides 24 shades into four groupings that would seem intended to offer something for just about every taste. For instance, while the refined Conscious Luxury colors (including Plummy and Insightful Rose) aim to engage the blue-blood set, the Techno-Color grouping, with an acid-y Hep Green and lipstick-y Ruby Shade, clearly zeroes in on a younger, more daring demographic.

Bloggers on the design site apartmenttherapy.com were mixed over the Sherwin-Williams launch. “WhatEVER,” sniffed one. “I’m sure we’ll all continue using what we like.” Dissed another: “I’d paint an Easter egg with these colors, not my house.”

The problem is, a lot of people are a lot clearer on hues they can live without than those they’d want to live with daily. Almost everyone’s had the experience of standing in front of a sea of rainbow-shaded chips at a paint or hardware store and fighting that drowning feeling.

To help, just about every paint line has some sort of tool on its Web site to help the flummoxed narrow the field, and there are independent sites, such as www.colorforyour home.com and www.huecon sulting.blogspot.com, that offer therapy for the color-confused.

House Beautiful’s just-out “Colors for Your Home: 300 Designer Favorites” (Hearst Books, $14.95) also seems perfectly primed to help with these daunting decisions. Based on a long-running series in the magazine, the book is essentially a compilation of color samples, each accompanied by a quote from the designer explaining why the hue works.

While the prose sometimes gets a little, um, purple, the intel on why certain colors click in certain settings is fascinating. The ideas are there for the taking, even if the accompanying photos of rooms pristinely decorated to the point of sterility beg for a Girl Scout troop with platefuls of crumbly cookies to humanize them.

“Painting a room isn’t something you should decide to run out and do on a Saturday morning,” cautions HGTV host Monica Pedersen, who has a video series titled Color Crisis Center at hgtv.com. “Take your time. Otherwise, you are creating double the work for yourself.”

In other words, if your paint choice falls far short of hot-color-of-the-year status, your funk is likely to be a deep, deep shade of blue.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

COLORING IN 2009

Color Marketing Group, an association of color design professionals that has been predicting color trends for more than 45 years, lists (and explains) its projections for 2009 thusly:

Purple, purple, purple! Emerging as a hot fashion color last fall, purple is not just a fad —- it’s an entrenched trend, strongly influenced by the election. (After all, red plus blue equals purple.) Look for a grayed-out violet that works equally well as an accent or a neutral, as well as redder, plummier purples and bluer-influenced fuchsias in a huge range of products. Purple is 2009’s “must have” color.

Blue is the new green: Various greens have symbolized “green living” over the past few years, but in 2009, the “green” environmental message is delivered by the color blue. There are watery blues, sky blues and a whole range of blues that now represent our commitment to living on a greener planet.

Cooled-down, grayed-out browns and grays: Complex neutrals satisfy our urge toward classic colors in an economically challenged time. They also bridge the area between black, which seems harsh, and brown, which doesn’t seem strong enough.

Yellow for energy: The neutrals may have grayed, but look for lots and lots of bright vivid yellow to give us energy as we rebuild the economy. It’s the stand-out accent color for 2009.

Bright accents from India, China and Turkey: The exotic has become the familiar. Oranges, turquoises and teals, reds and yellows will abound in hues from faraway countries that now seem very near. They are the optimistic touches we crave.

White is now a business color: Technology has produced amazing new (and very practical) finishes, which helps explain why white is showing up everywhere, even in corporate boardrooms. The contrasts are all in the finishes: matte vs. gloss; shine and shimmer on reflective surfaces; textured whites vs. smooth —- all washable and cleanable. White also represents purity of thought, motive and result —- exactly what we want from businesses now.

The return of the “M” word: It’s mauve. Remember mauve? An old color that looks new again, in dusty violet shades, mauve works as an accent but also serves now as a neutral, punched up by those bright Asian accents (orange, turquoise, teal, red and yellow).

TIPS TO GET ROLLING

HGTV host Monica Pedersen’s suggestions for picking the right home paint color:

> Buy a sample pot of paint, and color a piece of posterboard as a large paint chip for the wall. “Paint looks different all day long, so you’ll want to lay it out in your space and your light,” Pedersen says.

> Move the large chip around for several days before deciding on the color.

> Consider a matte finish. “I love flat paint. I use it in every room I can,” Pedersen says. “It hides imperfections and, unlike semi-gloss or satin, you can touch it up without having to repaint entire sections of the wall.” “Scrubbable” mattes for the kitchen and bath are “great news in the world of finishes.”

—- Associated Press

CAR COLORS PLAY IT SAFE

While residential paint colors grow more varied by the year, colors for cars continue to head in a conservative direction.

The recently released 2008 DuPont Automotive Color Popularity Report said white was the top vehicle color choice in North America for the second year in a row, followed by close runners-up black and silver. Silver had been No. 1 for seven years before white knocked it off.

The report by DuPont, a major coatings supplier to the global automotive market, referred to white as a “palette-cleansing color signaling a pause after a long-running trend and in advance of a new trend.”

Rapidly gaining in the rearview mirror of white, black and silver, according to DuPont: blue and red.

—- Howard Pousner

WHEN BAD PAINT NAMES HAPPEN TO GOOD PICKUPS

Head-scratching color names aren’t limited to house paints. Motor Trend’s Truck Trend Web site drove that point home when it posted a list of the worst truck color names of recent years.

“The colors might not be bad, but imagine bragging to buddies about your new Mocha Frost 4x4,” the posting noted.

Here’s the best of the worst:

> Evening Orchid (Chevrolet El Camino)

> Beige Mystique (Chevrolet C/K)

> Seaspray Green (Dodge Ramcharger and D-Series)

> Sunset Orange (Chevrolet Avalanche)

> Boysenberry Blue (Ford Ranger)

> Desert Violet (Ford Explorer)

> Mocha Frost (Ford Ranger)

> Tahitian Yellow (International Harvester Scout —- 800 Series)

> Bright Bittersweet (Ford Bronco II)

> Wild Strawberry (Ford F-150)

—- Howard Pousner