Every December Pantone chooses a “Color of the Year” — a hue that the color-matching company feels represents the global zeitgeist.
Most people I’ve talked to think of this tradition as a marketing tactic. A random selection made by a bunch of suits in Jersey. But for content creators, designers, marketers, trendsetters, or anyone with an interest in color theory or the Now, it’s both a reflection of where we are and a forecast of what’s to come.
This year the color is Mocha Mousse: The company’s first time selecting a shade of brown, and the name makes my mouth water with visions of smooth chocolate or a soothing cup of Joe…
Black coffee is for getting things done, but brown coffee is for cozying up next to a window on a rainy day.
I admit to feeling a sense of calm when the color was announced. There was joy that “brown” was being celebrated but there was also some hope for where we were as a people. Brown like the Earth. Grounded, perhaps.
Pantone itself attributes the selection process to rigorous year-round research conducted by The Pantone Color Institute — a color consulting service within the company, that was established to educate designers about the language and psychology of color choice and “draw attention to the relationship between culture and color,” per the company’s website.
In order to make their selection, these color experts (publishers, marketing experts, makeup moguls, trend forecasters… leaders in any industry that thinks about color on a daily basis) travel the world assessing today’s fashion, marketing methods, politics, and so on.
And the name is as important as the emotion that the color evokes. Pantone uses words like “contentment” and “simple pleasures” to describe their choice for 2025, “answering [to] our desire for comfort.”
For a girl who prioritizes comfort over everything shy of basic needs, Pantone’s choice piqued my interest. I love the idea of aspirational opulence and creating personal moments of luxury, to steal just a few seductive descriptors from Pantone. At a time when the world is fraught with fear and uncertainty, the reasoning resonated with me …but it also felt irresponsible. Comfort is not cheap and for a lot of people in our country and around the world right now, it’s an unaffordable luxury.
I found myself wondering if and how Pantone’s annual choice has historically correlated with our financial and economic health. So naturally, I built a spreadsheet.
I decided to start with the technical makeup of Pantone’s color choices by collecting all the Colors of the Year from their website and identifying each of the RGB components using screenshots of their color cards and Mac’s Digital Color Meter.
For those of us less color-educated, RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue. These are the primary colors of light (not to be confused with the primary colors of pigments which are red yellow and blue), meaning they make up every color you see on digital displays, including your television, smartphone, computer screen, and tablet. Colors displayed through light have varying intensities of Red, Green, and Blue, each one on a scale from 0 to 255. Red, for example, is (255, 0, 0).
And now for the fun part.
It was important for me to pay attention to the global economy over the domestic economy because of the emphasis of “global” in the Pantone Color of the Year selection.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank announce their forecasts for the global GDP growth rate twice a year — usually in April and September or October, in their World Economic Outlook (WEO) reports. But they don’t establish a formal growth rate at any point. When the color experts make their decision in December for the following calendar year, they only know the projected global GDP growth rate for the current calendar year.
In order to better sync these timelines, I catalogued the Pantone colors to represent the year that they were announced, rather than the year that they represent (e.g. 2000’s Cerulean being assigned to 1999, since it was announced in December ’99).
Spoiler alert: What I found is that the intensity of Green in Pantone’s selection correlates directly with our economic status quo. It was actually the only primary color that had a statistically significant trendline against GDP growth rates.
Now before I go on bragging about what I found I should mention that I was paying little attention to Green at first, primarily because of its minimal presence over the years.
If you’re looking at the primary color with the highest intensity each year, Red won more than half the time, often by a landslide.
Blue and Green were neck and neck, but the intensity with which they existed favored Blue: Red’s median intensity across Pantone’s 28 colors of the year was 141.5, compared to Blue’s 107.5, and Green’s mere 95.
I found myself focusing more on Red and Blue — until a certain correlation got my attention:
A .55 r-value showed a moderate correlation between the amount of Blue and the amount of Green the Institute tended to land on. When I looked at the Green:Blue correlation more closely, I found that in the years when the Annual GDP growth rate was lowest — 2009 and 2020 — the Institute named colors that were more Green than Blue.
In fact, 83% of the time that there was more Green than Blue in Pantone’s selection, the world was experiencing a slower economic growth rate than the year prior. The exceptions being 2002 and 2004.
If this relationship reflected what was already happening, was there anything that indicated what was to come?
Looking at the above chart, the GDP growth rate went up or stayed the same 50% of the time that there was more Green than Blue. With a 50/50 chance of decline, no argument could be made there.
But when I looked at the relationship between the intensity of Green and the intensity of Red, something stuck out. Given the slower GDP growth rate in 2024 relative to 2023 — and our current projection to grow at an even slower rate in 2025 — I isolated the years since 1999 that similarly had lower GDP growth rates than the year before.
What I found was that, with the exception of 2001, every year that the growth rate had gone up, Pantone had chosen a color that favored Green relative to the Green:Red trendline.
Mocha Mousse — the color announced in 2024 to represent 2025 — falls just below the trendline, which means our GDP growth rate is likely going to continue downwards next year. And the IMF’s 2.8% projection for 2025 (down from 3.3% in 2024) confirms that.
Pantone’s explanations for their color choices don’t get so technical as to dive into the RGB of it all. And while they admit to considering the economy in their selection process, their focus is on how we consumers react to it.
So what does “Green” mean?
My first thought was “Money.” I had to remind myself that A. This is a global conversation so we can’t limit it to American money, and B. I am not a color psychology expert.
In December 2016, a famously contentious and divisive time, Pantone announced “Greenery” as the 2017 Color of the Year. There was a general uncertainty about how things would play out in the world politically and socially. The global GDP growth rate was inching downwards, from 3.5% two years ago to 3.4% and then 3.3% in 2016. In the U.S., real GDP was at 1.6% (a healthy economy is said to grow between 2-3%). But it wasn’t money that Pantone talked about in its reason for picking Greenery. And while, yes, they conceded that Green can be associated with greed, envy, and jealousy, it also represents positivity, health, life, and luck.
And couldn’t we all use a little bit of those things in 2026? So far, there’s a slight uptick in the IMF’s projection for 2026. Here’s to hoping that Pantone sees something promising out there. And that next year’s RGB is (0, 255, 0).