Golden orange

Orange is expressive

Orange is an exciting color that calls attention to its own strangeness. Neutral colors feel inoffensively bland, and primary colors feel stable and rigid. Secondary colors like orange have a greater expressive capacity. Orange does not play it safe.

My color of the year for 2026, Golden orange #d98f2b, is fearless and distinctive. It doesn't wait quietly in the background. It invites conversation, and even disagreement. It asks the other to meet it halfway and engage with it, unlike other colors such as white. Orange is not a background you lay ideas on top of. Orange is the dialogue. Its spirit is bright and fragrant. It reminds me of flavorful citrus fruits, which are fresh and alive. Consuming an orange is an experience from start to finish: digging your fingers into its skin, ripping out each segment, and capturing excess juice on napkins. You cannot ignore the orange as you eat it.

Some oranges, like MUTCD Orange (PANTONE 152 C) #e57100, exist to grab your attention. They jump out at you while driving, necessarily louder than anything else. Golden orange carries this burst of energy, but mellowed out to a friendlier, more refined tone to define a year of joy.

My choice of orange is softened by its connection to gold, reflected in the muted color of #d98f2b. This golden ancestry makes an orange feel older, warmer, more grounded, more secure, more physically present. A neutral color is an empty stage for a consumable, disposable product to live in. It is impossible for orange to occupy this role; orange is just too loud.

Golden orange in the wild

Golden orange is the color of all the food at Raising Cane's, which I had for the first time in November 2025.

Golden orange is the color of this serene :steamhappy: GIF I use frequently.

Golden orange is the color of the setting sun on a napping dog.

Disappointment with PANTONE

Pantone Color of the Year 2026 is Cloud Dancer (PANTONE 11-4201 TCX) #f0efeb. Their article elaborates that this color expresses "relaxation and focus", which give way to creative thinking. This is yet another annual disappointment from PANTONE.

Some critics have made the obvious observation that a white like Cloud Dancer does not constitute "a color" and is therefore ineligible for status as Color of the Year. The products advertized as collaborations with PANTONE are ridiculous this year. You can buy white Play-Doh; white is the color of the year. You can buy white Post-it notes; white is the color of the year. These products, which are usually brightly colored to grab your attention and encourage lateral thinking, are now presented colorlessly to elicit the same effect. You can play with undyed modeling compound, and write on undyed sticky paper, and this counts as consuming this year's color-product.

I am a fervent fan of all grayscale tones, so the critique that white is the absence of a color feels incomplete to me. Many a great object is white: a marshmallow, a clean pillow, or winter's first snowfall in Milwaukee. PANTONE is justified to say that white evokes a blank canvas where imagination takes place. But leaving the imagination to us, the users, feels like PANTONE not upholding their end of the contract. PANTONE is handing us a blank sheet of paper from our printers. It is uninteresting.

White comes across not only as uninspired but also tone-deaf. The current American administration is indiscriminately arresting and deporting non-white Americans in pursuit of whiteness and homogeneity. In many spaces, it is no longer safe to be brown or rainbow. It is impossible to witness Pantone's slew of articles and posts celebrating the color white without thinking about my government's obsession with crime and punishment. It is impossible to read about white's association to purity without thinking about the concentration camp my country sends Hispanic Americans to. It is probably appropriate to allow these horrible reminders to resurface constantly in the coming year, but I do not think this is PANTONE's intended effect.

White, which remains among my favorite colors, is an egregious choice of a color of the year.