alt Hacker NewsWhy is the world losing color?
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Wow, so much to rage about from the article.
I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars, phones, etc. (Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though).
Resale value, it hides dirt well are some of the sadder excuses I hear for buying gray and "silver" cars (wouldn't be cool if they really were silver, not "metallic gray"). Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.
Color grading might be the most evil thing to descend on film making. It's to the point of distraction now. Like it draws attention to itself. (Watching "Mickey 17" in a theater and a scene comes on that screams "color graded!" and then it's become all I can see. Kind of like the nausea-inducing, shaky "hand held camera" thing that was so predominate some decades ago. Good riddance to that.
Oh well, I guess all I can do is to keep voting with my shopping preferences.
I would argue that the main reason is because everything is about money, and the shorter marketability of everything. Colors are polarising, and affect the unsold inventory and perceived resale value.
Why manufacture objects in 10 different colours if you know the green one is going to be a tough sell? Why buy a blue car if you think you’re going to sell it back after 2 years and struggle to do so?
You don’t want things you don’t intend to keep to have personally, period.
A long time ago I adopted a personal style of wearing bright colors. I have simple good fitting t-shirts in all colors. Glasses in blue and red. Shoes in yellow. Sandals in green. Jackets in orange. You get the idea.
It's always easy to make an outfit that goes together and makes a good impression. Men's Japanese and European fashion brands work well with this choice. I see this on the streets in Paris or Amsterdam fairly commonly, but rarely in the US.
I've found that it's very disarming and engaging; even though I'm over 6'3" and a big guy with a tight hair cut, I'm almost never perceived as a threat. I'm a natural introvert, but it seems to make approachability easier. Since having a kid, and him growing into a toddler, I think it helps there too. It's just more fun. Strong recommend.
> According to major auto paint suppliers, more than 80% of new cars are now grayscale. Black, white, gray, and silver dominate the roads. Reds, blues, and greens in auto production are increasingly rare.
This is biased data: when cars that are not white or black cost 1000 of euros more from the factory, and custom non-preselected colors even more, then people tend to but the cheap colors. Especially when they are corporate lease cars and the corporation doesn’t care about the color.
If car companies want more color, do not charge for it.
Gen Z is rejecting this "millennial bland" aesthetic of turning all spaces into an Apple store. Just one reason I appreciate and look forward to the coming generation. Take a look at some of their trends in art, music, fashion, graphic design... plenty of color to be found.
For me, it is very apparent in movies nowadays.
I watched the Lord of the Rings over Christmas, and I was stunned by how colorful the movie is. Even in the darkest scenes in Mordor, it felt more colorful than movies of today.
Today, it looks like everything is shot in log and then someone does not add the saturation back. But I am also guilty of this .. when I got my new camera, my graded clips also looked very flat, but I like(d) that look because of all the movies and youtube videos looking like this.
May I make a case for brown?
- Brown is an extremely warm color, and sucks up all of the ugly blues from unnatural light sources
- Brown pairs well with all sorts of shades and colors, just like the millennial gray and white tones
- Brown can come in all sorts of shades and vibrancies, but is not as stimulating as other colors
- Brown hides dirt, scuffs, and stains extremely well
Humans have spent most of our history being very familiar with the color brown in our natural world. I moved from a modern home (everything in white and grays) and into a 1920s brown home with brown-beige walls and all of its original brown wood accents and fixtures. And then I stuffed it with brown furniture. Not only is it beautiful and cozy, I swear that this was the first year I didn't suffer from seasonal affective disorder in a long time.
One interesting thread here is the long shadow of Greek and later Roman statuary and architecture on Western European self image - the marble statues, columns, and architecture of the Roman empire were taken as the origin story for Western culture - "we were an empire built on philosophers and artists, and look at the (gleaming white) purity of their works."
It turns out, of course, that all those gleaming white statues were vibrantly colored back when their creators were around, and the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
(Ironically, both stoicism and Christian asceticism were responses to that Roman excess, but they've somehow been merged with the white marble to produce a "purity" aesthetic to be lionized whenever someone gets the mildly uncomfortable notion that their neighbor is not exactly like them.)
Part of this that affects me is interior decorations in the age of RGB LED lighting. If your home interior is white, you can cast any color onto it from an RBG light, but if your interior paint has a non-greyscale hue, coloring it with LED lights produces unexpected results that are inconsistent with other areas of the house that are painted other colors.
Another part that affects me is being colorblind. When I was in elementary school I was mocked for wearing one blue sock and one purple sock, something that I was unaware that I was doing. I began wearing less color because at least I could be confident that I wasn't mismatching my clothes. But then in high school I was mocked for always wearing greyscale clothes because "what are you, colorblind or something?"
A lot of this stuff is just designers imitating each other. You see this a lot in web design where every website uses similar colors, fonts, visual language etc. I've worked with a few good designers that do actual original design where the point is to be different in a tasteful way. Standing out from the grey masses. If you get a lot of people copying each other, it all averages out to the same bland/boring stuff.
A lot of Hollywood productions these days are sequels, re-runs, and endless variations of successful movies. Down to copying stylistic elements, color grading, etc.
I love Tim Burton and Wes Anderson as directors. Both use vibrant, saturated colors and have a very recognizable style. Tim Burton uses lush, saturated colors to portray suburbs (many of his movies feature lush green lawns white picket fences, etc.).
And Wes Anderson has his famous style of exactly centered subjects,using a lot of surrealist visuals, and elaborate sets and models. I loved the little Roald Dahl thing he did on Netflix two years ago or so (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) where all of this was on display. If you haven't seen that, worth a watch.
"Color has always had a strange status in Western philosophy — and more often than not, that status is second-class."
I wonder if one big change is a shift from a more working class family focus to an upper class influencer focus. Maybe this is just because was a kid, but It does feel to me like as a kid in the 80's and 90's and probably earlier, that the middle class was essentially the aspiration, and everything was geared towards the middle class family, think happy meals and McDonald's play place. Now, everything is geared for the wealthy social media influencer's, it's not a meal, it's an experience.
I live in South Africa, and when I traveled to the Netherlands on holiday last year, I was quite taken aback at how muted everyone's clothing was.
It is definitely not like that here - everything from our flag down is full of color.
It's a cute article, but I don't think it holds up under scrutiny. I suspect it is much more a collection of unrelated reasons:
* Historical objects in museums are likely more colorful because we cared to preserve the most visually striking objects. Classic survivorship bias.
* Music has less dynamic range than in early recordings because producers were competing to be the loudest sounding song on the radio (see "loudness wars"). Those wars are actually over now and dynamic range has been increasing for about a decade.
* There is a whole lot going on behind trends in cinematographer color grading if you look into that world. But in the example here, I think it's largely that audiences expected "muted brown" as the color grade to send a "period film" signal. Witness also how every medieval or fantasy movie feels compelled to have all of the castle walls bare gray rock when they were in fact plastered and brightly colored. Likewise Roman architecture being alabaster white. Audiences wouldn't believe a Roman movie with painted statues or a fantasy film with colorful castle walls.
* Cars have muted colors because consumers moved towards a model where they sell cars every few years. When purchasing a car, they choose neutral colors to maximize resale value. Also, I think cars are simply much less a part of someone's social identity and status symbol and more of a utilitarian object than they they used to be. (Witness that when people buy expensive sports cars, those are more likely to be brightly colored.)
* Interior design trends come and go, but I think one of the drivers of gray walls was that it became a popular style for Airbnb rentals to avoid turning off potential renters. That led it to become associated with internationalism and modernity, and from there it sort of took off. Also, an increasing number of people are renting and are simply unable to paint their walls more interesting colors.
For those not in on Twitter lore I want to point out that the post is written by a well known white nationalist/neo-nazi dog whistling account.
Interestingly, there was a specific printing technology for expanding the palette of colour printing, Hexachrome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachrome
Tried several times to use it in projects, but the customer always balked at the additional plate charges, even when they _loved_ the added vibrancy and colour range.
The only printer I know of who was actually successful using it to make money was in London --- took on spot colour jobs from other printers when the spot colour was inside the expanded Hexachrome gamut, allowing for a faster turn-around (jobs on the same stock were ganged up) and no charge for washing down a press to change out the ink.
American video games used to be that, all brown, and Japanese games tended to be more saturated and colorful. To some extent this is still be true but I've noticed a willingness now to break out of the bleak color grading.
> It’s not just cars — a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.
That is... not what that first chart ("Percent of pixels") shows? Much the opposite — reddish beige to taupe dominated the 1800s and slowly dwindled to ~20% by 2020. Meanwhile, greens and blues became a lot more common from 1960 onward.
To this article's credit, it does acknowledge the shift towards industrial materials, but it's still worth reading the article [0] where this chart originates. The nature of photographing objects contributes to the wider range of brown hues in older objects:
> The wide range of colours in the telegraph comes in large part from the mahogany wood used in its construction. But the colours also come from its shape (the rounded pillars reflect light and create shadows) as well as its age (the wear and tear creates colour variations).
whereas more recent objects trend toward smaller sizes and homogenous materials that photograph more evenly:
> In contrast, the metal and plastic materials in the iPhone give much less variation. It also has a more basic shape and is in better condition.
The pure grayscale band at the top of that chart has expanded significantly, but (variation in beige-ishness aside) can you really say that the left side of the graph is much less homogenous?
[0] https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
Am I the only one who thought the lead photo should have included Gen 1 iMac vs. latest lineup? Even the 2021 anodized aluminum version is comparatively muted!
My wife convinced me that we should buy a dark gray car cause it would be less obviously dirty. I deeply regret not trying harder to convince her back, so we'd get a bright red or yellow one instead. It's super hard to find the car back on a parking lot and who cares when it's dirty? Bright colors are nice. I'm now trying to compensate by only buying colorful clothing going forward.
I won't pretend to be an expert on the cultural aspects of this, but the most compelling historical proof they have of their thesis is that chart showing the measurement of hue over a whole bunch of objects in museums, by era.
Is it possible this is a bit of... https://xkcd.com/1138/ ? The Y axis is 100% because you can only look at the objects we have, but that doesn't reflect the fact we don't have 100% of objects from 1800. We only have the objects we cared enough about to protect.
So... in someways, (in no way proof of anything) this could show the opposite? We produce a lot of junky monochrome things that get thrown away fast, and things that we care enough to protect for generations tend to be coloured. We're sort of seeing the half-life of things by colour in that chart.
I miss the 90s and the wild, loud colours the landscape of the future was supposed to be painted in. Now everything is off-white or grey.
"Millennial Gray" is a somewhat derogatory term that describes the interior decorating in many people's homes. It seems to be a generational thing. I think color will come back as Gen Z and Gen Alpha get older and become more dominant in the economy.
When it comes to things like cars and room interiors, neutral colors have a much better resale value because they appeal to people more widely. For cars, vibrant colors might mean higher insurance rates (red cars are associated with sports cars, young drivers and aggressive driving).
I am continuously surprised by the neverending parade of white cars on the roads.
Random thoughts.
Movies: Movies descended from live theater, which was not realistic by definition, so things had to be attention-getting in order to draw people into the reality of the story, including use of color. Older movies, and older colorful movies, were closer to that tradition and therefore kept some of that impressionism, which faded as "realism" became the thing to do in movies.
Cars: Searching online I found this chart: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev... - and ... it seems that people stopped buying green and purple cars and are buying black, white, and silver instead, with red/burgundy varying somewhat over time. A paragraph here - https://www.colorwithleo.com/why-isnt-green-a-popular-car-co... - provides something insightful:
"Historical Perceptions of Green Cars
For many decades, green was seen as an unappealing and sometimes odd choice for vehicle color. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, green was associated with military and industrial vehicles, which didn’t make it an attractive option for personal cars. The green paints used on older vehicles also tended to fade and discolor over time, giving the color a reputation for looking worn and dated. This perception lingered for many years, and made consumers wary of choosing green for their own cars."
But not sure how true that is and not sure it would apply to the 90's--the starting time that the chart covers. I really don't remember anyone in the 90's having a green car at all, to be honest.
Logos: Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time, almost to the point where it's pretty much it's the brand name in a specific font in most cases. I recall reading about an "anti-branding" trend in logo design - https://shapesofidentity.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-anti-bra... - and that's because of lowered trust in brands overall - which is true. Brands aren't worth a damn if they can be bought and sold and the company beneath them change without notice.
> Baroque art stands in direct defiance of the chromophobic worldview. It doesn’t strip down experience in the name of order, but rather builds it up — embracing sensation and structure together.
All I can say is that if it is not baroque, do not fix it.
It would be nice if cars came in Hot Wheels Spectraflame. I’m sure the greigification of automobiles is down to some spreadsheet somewhere showing them they save two nickels for offering one less color.
Maybe only on surfaces. Lighting has become very colorful.
Look at modern Asian cities. Beijing is rather grey in daytime, but at night, there's colored lighting. Shenzhen, where LEDs are made, has reached insane levels of lighting effects at night. Not only do most of the skyscrapers have animated lighting effects, the effects are coordinated across the whole downtown area. Then there are frequent drone shows.
American cars are now coming stock with lighting effects previously seen on lowriders.
Interesting observation.
I prefer things with low color contrast in general, just to leave some color space for important things. Maybe this preference stems from the time I tweak color themes in IDEs.
In contrast, I also found more and more photography pieces which show vibrant colors and high color contrasts.
The 2020 study this is based on: https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
And there was already a very similar article last year: https://uxmag.com/articles/why-is-the-world-losing-color
I wonder if seeing the world through digital screens had any effect on this.
Biologically, color drives behavior. Exposure to the same color palette over time develops tolerance, so *different* colors might be perceived as more attractive.
I believe each individual is unique in their color perception and emotional response, but there's obviously a shared social aspect of it too.
That said, it's interesting to see the young generation's artistic preferences, which reminds me of 90's for some reason :)
They take Napoleon, as recent film with bleak colors.
I will take latest matrix. The movie was awful, of course, but I was in awe of its bright, vivid, wonderful color work. If only plot was better.
Does this attempt to normalize for the possible case that colour is overrepresented in older art because pigments were so precious? Do we see a lot more purple represented than we should have expected to if we went further back than 1800? And as it became cheaper, it’s less novel and less interesting to utilize?
The chart with car colors has been famous for a few years. However I'm seeing an inverse trend in past 1-2 years (at least in France); new cars are getting very colorful. For example:
- Renault Clio is very popular in metallic orange
- Renault 5 e-tech in bright yellow and green
- MG in aqua/azure blue
- Peugeot 208 in dark yellow and blue and dark red
Is that Mr. Bean (red car, lower right) stalking out his arch-nemesis (upper-left, yellow)?
NVM, I think that's a Fiat, not Austin.
It's the Seattlefication of the world.
Just got back from a trip to Spain and Portugal.
Basically had culture shock driving down a wide north american road.
It's not just the colors. It's the emptiness.
The clearance of everything in north america is insane. It's just so boring.
I loath the lack of vibrancy in modern design and fashion. So dull, so boring, so agreeable. Thankfully it allows people who do have a bit of personality to easily stand out if they want to. Still waiting a red MacBook pro
I’ve certainly noticed this in film and interior design (most AirBnBs will have a familiar grayscale palette), but the opposite trend has occurred in software. Windows 2000 was far less colorful than Windows 10, which in turn had a more saturated palette than Vista and Windows 7.
My small victory is to set the tv on a wider color space, and so make youtube more vivid. 5% of things will look a little strange, but the majority looks more beautiful. Note you actually need a modern tv with a REAL wide color space.
the car color thing may be real, but also it may be that people went overboard with color because they could, and then color got boring.
For the percent of colors in photos, i m not sure. Older technologies oversaturated colors and probably underrepresented greys (or turned them to red/green) , but maybe newer photo technologies allowed more blues and greys.
The cinema thing is real and very annoying to the point where i have to oversaturate all my screens in order to stop seeing actors' faces as corpses.
Maybe like spices. First they were something special in the western world, then they became abundant and cheap.
Why is nobody talking about how Car Insurance is typically higher with any real colour selections? Insurance companies calculate that vehicles with certain colours (for example, Red) have a higher statistical probability of being in a collision than say... grey. This has created a downward pressure for people who would like colours in their vehicles, but would instead prefer to just pay less in car insurance since they may be aware of this aspect.
I for one don't like that car insurance companies do this, but this very likely is a huge reason why fewer people buy vehicles with colour beyond Grey/etc.
Pair with this complementary piece by W. David Marx:
https://culture.ghost.io/cultural-stasis-produces-fewer-chee...
He writes about incentives since the 1990s that have pushed artists to shy away from making bold aesthetic choices that might seem dated a few years later.
The result is more stability and a longer shelf-life for culture, but less experimentation and fewer ways for new styles to break out.
cowardliness
There's a really interesting book about this exact topic: https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/chromophobia
edit: ha, the book is mentioned halfway through the essay. I should finish reading before commenting.
I agree with the book's thesis - there's an impulse to associate colour with "the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological" in contemporary western society. We've somehow managed to other color itself.
"The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’ – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic. Chromophobia has been a cultural phenomenon since ancient Greek times; this book is concerned with forms of resistance to it. Writers have tended to look no further than the end of the nineteenth century. David Batchelor seeks to go beyond the limits of earlier studies, analysing the motivations behind chromophobia and considering the work of writers and artists who have been prepared to look at colour as a positive value. Exploring a wide range of imagery including Melville’s ‘great white whale’, Huxley’s reflections on mescaline, and Le Corbusier’s ‘Journey to the East’, Batchelor also discusses the use of colour in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art."
I have a bright coloured car and it’s easy to find in the car park!
Wait, his "graph" measures a greater gamut of colors in photos from the nineteenth century when they were all B/W? Who's still buying this retvrn hucksterism?
The loss of color is concerning, but something I find interesting is the image the author chooses to illustrate Loos' quote, "We have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity." I would argue the building pictured falls short of this goal in important ways. A lot of contemporary architecture lacks the modernist commitment to flat planes, pure volumes, etc. and adds lazy and useless decorative/textural elements. The building pictured would look better if it was less adorned! (But even better with some color)
The ugliness of the contemporary world isn't a result of modernism, but rather neoliberal indifference to beauty.
It's not "losing" color.
At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.
But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.
Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.
I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.