December is the time when all creatives working with colors await the biggest news of the color industry to drop : Pantone's color of the year announcement. Love it or loathe it, they have established themselves as the color authority, and what they say usually has an impact for the year to come, some years more than others. So get ready to meet Mocha Mousse, because it's what Pantone chose as their color of the year for 2025. The reception has been lukewarm at best, with most designers, myself including not have much love for what I pretty much called "chocolate on Vallium" but there is no denying that Mocha Mousse is really sparking a debate in the color world these days. Those who love it call it sophisticated and soothing and I suspect it's very popular with all the proponent of the "Sad Beige Aesthetic" trend (yup that's a thing!) Pantone themselves said that they see it as a warm and soothing color that evokes comfort and luxury. But let's not kid ourselves shall we? It's BROWN, not just brown, but the most boring, flat and sedated shade of brown they could possibly find. A lot of designer called it poop brown, mud brown, or "the color of the paint water after kid's art class"
With the HEX code A47863 you have a brown with a terracotta orange/brown that sits right at the limit between color and gray. It's safe and non threatening, a neutral in every sense of the word.
While I am not a fan of that particular shade of brown, or Pantone's call of picking a neutral as their color of the year I don't mind warm earth tones palettes. What I find a bit disturbing though is how the sad beige trend is gaining more and more traction, especially with influencers on social media. What's even more disturbing is that we are now in a world where the absence of colors is associated with calm, peace and a soothing feeling.
I watched a reel pointing to that trend towards neutral everything that points out that colors evoke emotions and neutrals sedate people into a world of no emotion. This is very dangerous, having no emotion, no distinct personality is going against diversity.
I get that the world is very uncertain right now with inflation being out of control in several areas of the globe, the US elections, the rise of extreme right in many places, the war in Ukraine and Palestine. But is Mocha Mousse really a soothing answer to all that? Or is it the symptom of an era where people are too tired to think, or feel anything positive at all? I'm firmly in the camp of those believing that sad beige is a lazy approach to everything. It's safe, it's boring and it's easy to mix and match neutrals. People are more and more affraid to stick out, be weird, or make a stance about anything these days, thanks to an overly divisive mindset where you might be flamed or cancelled for just about anything. If you are beige and blah, you don't stick out, if you don't stick out, you are safe and nobody will come after you for having an ounce of personality. Make no mistake, this is the "peace" that Mocha Mouse evokes, there is nothing warm about that tone of brown otherwise. As a designer, I of course have to at least look into that trend and I have created a few patterns (like the two wallpapers in the first picture) with Pantone's 2025 palettes because of a design challenge on Spoonflower, and because even though I hate this sad beige trend, as a commercial artist I can't ignore it. You won't see an awful lot of those tones in my work, but I am working on experimenting with neutrals a bit more, and infuse them with my usual bold colors as a happy medium. I can see all those mocha and chocolate hue working really well with autumn themed designs, so it's not all lost. Here's to hopping Pantone will give us a beautiful emerald or forest green for 2026
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