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.
