I don’t know about you, you probably have more serious issues to deal with and haven’t even heard the news, but I was disappointed with the color chosen by the Pantone Institute to shine in 2026. White!?
The choice of color is one of those end-of-year rituals that, in Brazil, have already marked the selection of the Certinhas do Lalau, and now, so as not to run the risk of gender crimes, they travel the world with intellectualized contests such as that of choosing the word of the season (in Portugal it was “blackout”).
“Cloud Dancer” has been chosen as the color of 2026, but don’t let the poetry of its name fool you. After the abominable off-white, this is the new shameful way to improve the status of old white. The “cloud dance” is defined in the ad as “a soft white that suggests beginnings, a space to explore amid the excesses and noise of the world – a whisper of calm and peace.”
It’s as if the choice of color for 2026 was dictated by a laughable argument of color activism, by the ideology of slightly left-wing pigments, and entered the field, like “let’s join hands”, “let’s imagine everyone”, to help Lula and Alcolumbre stay on good terms. It’s the color of not compromising.
There are times when “cloud dance” resembles the bluish white of the ICU, other times it appears grimy, in clear disgrace compared to the genre’s former exponents, the white Rinso and the radiant total white of Omo. White in the 60s made sense – the Beatles album, in full psychedelia, was a scandal – but in 2026 this “cloud dance” is just a funny name which must have brought a lot of money to the publicist who invented it.
For 2026, it was necessary to discover a color which does not pride itself on “neutrality”, but which has more important objectives than that of serving as a scale for “designers, architects and creatives” to achieve “infinite combinations”. Pantone white is the color of silence and absence of opinion, a demagogic monochrome that does not respond, as expected, to the blood-red chaos of wars or the orange threats of Trump. On the contrary. This is the true color of a donkey when it runs away.
In his pretension, he seems to want to escape a fundamental touchstone of the times, the need for playful hue and astonishment. White presents itself as sophisticated, but, unsurprisingly, it serves to explain emptiness by painting distress in the phrase “it has gone white.” It is the absence of all colors, of all courage. In Airbnb properties, this should be the most prominent color on the walls – there is no controversy with the tenant.
There are many colors in the world: the blue silk of the paper that wraps the apple, the yellow of Van Gogh, the green and pink of Mangueira, the “non-existent color” of the critic Israel Pedrosa, the blue of Picasso, the reds of açaí and the fauvism of Matisse. In 2021, chemistry professor Mas Subramanian invented a new blue, YlnMn Blue. How about a new green?
The white “cloud dancer” is sad. Lack of imagination. Some time ago, a laundry detergent made a change in direction in its advertising. He left aside the cracks in the clothes so disturbingly white. He asked that, above all else, people have fun, roll with laughter, roll in the grass and do the same thing as I am now, purple with enthusiasm, asking in the colors of the Pantone Institute: “Get dirty!”
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