Our recent internet era has been plagued by a barrage of quiet luxury, sleek tradwife aesthetics, clean girls, sad beige babies, tech oligarchs, Sydney Sweeney’s good jeans and more. Pantone brought a fascinating addition to this landscape with its Color of the Year selection for 2026, Cloud Dancer — an off-white, beige-ish color that feels as fitting as it is incendiary.
First, what is Pantone? Put most simply, it is a company that standardizes color in manufacturing processes. Pantone creates and names thousands of proprietary color swatches, each of which has a corresponding formula. The company prints these swatches onto physical cardstock and sells them to designers and factories.
If a designer in Boston asks a factory in Shenzhen to produce orange packaging, they may receive a vastly different product than intended. The orange may be too warm, too cool, too dark or too light. However, if they ask for Pantone color No. 17-1349 TCX, Exuberance, the factory is able to reference Pantone’s color guide and mix precise amounts of pigment and ink to produce the exact shade the designer had in mind.
In the company’s own words, “Pantone provides a universal language of color.” It reports that “more than 10 million designers and producers around the world rely on Pantone products and services.” The company’s influence on global industrial production is utterly undeniable. Qais Assali, professor of the practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, observed that Pantone’s overwhelming influence is evident not just for artists but for humans in general.
“I love their catalogs and [could] spend a day … just going through the colors from [a] color theory perspective, but also from what is now feelings and colors,” Assali said.
Pantone’s near-monopolistic position in the worlds of design and manufacturing means that its annual tradition of selecting a color to represent the upcoming year is a highly anticipated and impactful event. Since the first Color of the Year in 2000 — 15–4020 TCX, Cerulean — designers and brands have consistently rolled out products featuring the chosen color, from Skims sets to iPhones.
Notably, this is not a one-way street. Take the 2016 color, Rose Quartz, a light, soft pink that many would immediately recognize as ‘millennial pink.’ The color initially gained attention in 2015 when internet aesthetics and female-focused companies started incorporating it into their branding. Pantone recognized the growing popularity of the color and cemented its ubiquity by officially selecting it to represent 2016. Those who were there can attest: The world seemed absolutely awash in millennial pink.
Taking this context into consideration, the question stands: Why, out of the more than one million colors the human eye is capable of perceiving, did Pantone choose Cloud Dancer to represent 2026?
According to the company, Cloud Dancer is “a whisper of tranquility and peace in a noisy world.” Pantone suggests that the color is evocative of a blank canvas, representative of the fresh start and serenity the world currently seeks.
These intentions have not necessarily resonated. Online, the backlash was immediate and intense. Some called the choice tone-deaf, while others suggested it was a white supremacist dog whistle. The context of our current cultural and political climate plays an important role here.
In the past few years, we have witnessed federal agents attack immigrants and kill anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protestors, attempts to shut down and defund Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs and increased investment in the deportation industrial complex aimed at boosting ICE operations.
Read in this context, Pantone’s claim that they’re “looking for fulfillment by opting for a quieter, less fussy life and serenity for a lightness of being” appears rather puzzling. The reality is that today only a select class of people can afford the choice to turn away from the ‘noise’ of the world, and fewer still have the luxury of dancing on clouds. Thus, the selection and reasoning behind this Color of the Year feels like a stifling and alarming misunderstanding of priorities rather than a calming symbol for tranquility.
Part-time lecturer Mikey MacMahon, professor of the “Color and Critical Inquiry” course at the SMFA, wrote about the controversy in an email to the Daily.
“In 2026 an off‑white [color] arrives amid headlines about resurgent far‑right nationalism and ongoing debate over the way whiteness organizes perception and value. Many interpret the selection as tone deaf, as whitewashing or as politically charged,” he wrote.
Reactions from students and artists at the SMFA affirm this idea.
“It feels very political — like why are we choosing white now?” fourth-year Kalim Fernandes said. “I don’t think I’m too surprised that the art world might have [rising conservatism]. … White supremacy is [overshadowing] everything.”
While many consider minimalism — a movement centered on neutral colors and a rejection of ornamentation — simply a modern aesthetic movement, it has also been historically intertwined with the visual language of fascist regimes. For example, consider Italian rationalist architecture under Benito Mussolini, which primarily utilized clean lines, simple shapes and the color white.
“There was some overlap between the minimalist movement and fascism,” Mai Pham, a fifth-year combined-degree student, said. “Do I need to say we live in fascist times? We do. All across the world.”
Pantone, however, denies any political influence in its choice, with spokesperson Leatrice Eiseman issuing a statement claiming that the Pantone Color Institute selected Cloud Dancer for “its emotional and creative resonance” and “not as a statement on politics, ideology or race.” How do we square the clear fissure between Pantone’s intentions in choosing Cloud Dancer and the public’s reactions to it?
“Meanings emerge at the point of encounter, not at the point of selection,” MacMahon wrote. “Pantone’s pick functions less as a command and more as a diagnostic that makes cultural pressures visible through the frictions it provokes.”
With Cloud Dancer, the corporation attempted to provide the world with respite and serenity, but manyt rejected it.
“It just reflects their milieu and the class and atmosphere of Pantone,” Pham said.
Instead, many people recognized the color as a fitting symbol for our dire political moment, and meaning is generated through that recognition. The unknowing and ironic accuracy of Cloud Dancer is at the heart of this conversation. In writer and artist John Paul Brammer’s words, this color is “the only decision for 2026. That’s what’s intolerable about it.”
At the end of the day, does any of this truly matter? Pantone’s Color of the Year is not necessarily on most students’ radars, even if they care deeply about art. When asked whether she usesPantone’s color system in her classes, Pham said no.
“I am skeptical about the whole arrangement that makes us think of standards of beauty, corruption, industries [and] the whole world,” Assali said.
Indeed, no company, institute or panel of experts, however influential, will ever be able to fully understand the lofty idea of ‘global culture,’ let alone capture it in a single color. We should continually question Pantone’s claim to universality and authority. Only through that process can we begin to dismantle and confront the systems of power that dictate our all-consuming product and trend cycles.
“Since when was Pantone the arbiter of culture? We are the arbiter of culture,” Pham said.
