OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
8:30 AM – Saturday, December 6, 2025
The color experts at Pantone have predicted the next “color of the year” for 2026: “Cloud Dancer.”
PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer is, in short, a shade of white. The Pantone Color Institute announced its color choice for the new year on Friday.
“At this time of transformation, when we are reimagining our future and our place in the world, PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer is a discrete white hue offering a promise of clarity,” said Pantone Color Institute Executive Director Leatrice Eiseman. “The cacophony that surrounds us has become overwhelming, making it harder to hear the voices of our inner selves. A conscious statement of simplification, Cloud Dancer enhances our focus, providing release from the distraction of external influences.”
“Similar to a blank canvas, Cloud Dancer signifies our desire for a fresh start. Peeling away layers of outmoded thinking, we open the door to new approaches. An airy white hue, PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer opens up space for creativity, allowing our imagination to drift so that new insights and bold ideas can emerge and take shape,” Pantone Color Institute Vice President Laurie Pressman explained.
Pressman told CNN that Pantone’s goal in predicting the color of the year since 1999 is to “highlight how what is taking place in our macro-culture at a moment in time is expressed through the language of color.”
The shade of white, with its “equal balance of cool and warm undertones,” was thoughtfully chosen upon the institute’s review of current events, trends and culture.
“The color name is critical. The minute you hear a name describing color, you instantly conjure up an image,” Pressman added.
The vice president explained how so much thought can go into a shade of white, finding that it was not as simple as it may seem, as every color can lean more cool or warm-toned, which can create different feelings about the color.
“Had we gone for a white that was more optically bright, not only does it take away from the natural feeling and honesty and authenticity that we’re looking for … it almost speaks to sterility and isolationism, because it’s cold,” she said.
Pressman said that the choice is meant to embody natural materials like feathers.
The marketing for the color of the year features a woman wearing white clothing that blows in the wind as she faces a sky full of clouds.
“An airy white hue, Cloud Dancer exemplifies our search for balance between our digital future and our primal need for human connection,” Pressman stated.
Pantone also launched merchandise for the token shade of white, including collaborations with Joybird, a furniture company, Command, which has created Cloud Dancer wall hooks, Post-it, for those who need white sticky notes, and Play-Doh, which is celebrating “70 years of imagination” with a dough in the “serene white.”
Some on the left have come forward calling the choice dystopian and tone deaf — or “Pantone deaf,” and suggesting the choice has implications of racism.
“Pantone just released their color of the year for 2026 and it is severely lacking in pigment. It’s white. Not… not a good look,” one woman said in a social media video, while sitting on white furniture in front of a snowy white Christmas tree. “The optics of this? Not good. … Is white even technically a color? In the year of the Alligator Alcatraz and Sydney Sweeney and her good American Eagle jeans? Is this really the way you want to go?”
The woman in the video referenced American Eagle’s Brooke Shields-esque advertising campaign that went viral after those on the left accused Sweeney of white supremacy for connecting her blue jeans to the blue genes in her eyes.
A TikTok user also mentioned the viral denim campaign in a rant in response to the color choice.
“Is this just your funny little way of signaling to everyone that you’re switching to American manufacturing?” the user questioned. “If this isn’t the color of a hood, maybe it’s a flag,” she said, referencing both the Ku Klux Klan and the white flag of surrendering to the Trump administration as she asked, “Tariffs got your pigments?”
The color of the year for 2025 was PANTONE 17-1230, “Mocha Mousse,” a milk-chocolatey “brown hue imbued with richness.”
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