Mental Floss

Pantone Just Added 315 New Colors to Its Fashion, Home, and Interiors System

By Ellen Gutoskey

"Forest Elf" is now a Pantone color and that means it's finally time to make a Lord of the Rings shrine out of your spare room.
"Forest Elf" is now a Pantone color and that means it's finally time to make a Lord of the Rings shrine out of your spare room. / alfexe/iStock via Getty Images
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If you haven’t been able to find the perfect shade of blue for your guest bedroom yet, maybe Water Ballet, Swim Cap, or Exotic Plume will do the trick.

Those are just three of the 70 new blue hues Pantone has added to its Fashion, Home + Interiors Color System, an update that includes a total of 315 colors across the rainbow. According to House Beautiful, the expansion is meant to capture current trends and predict future ones. Its 50 new pinks, for example, reflect a rising popularity of that color in homes—and previous pink hues that make stunning fabrics or lipsticks might not necessarily translate as well on the wall of your renovated bathroom.

“The colors that are influencing design today have evolved to reflect shifting societal views, new technological innovations, and a truly global outlook,” Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, said in a statement.

In keeping with the spirit of evolution and advancement, Pantone has also revamped its layout to be more user-friendly for designers searching for certain shades, and launched new design technologies that provide digital access to the company’s entire 2625-color collection.

“As a global color authority for almost 60 years, designers look to Pantone to meet their color needs; from having the exact right color palette that will engage and entice their audience to providing efficient solutions that will help them reliably reproduce these colors in their designs,” Pantone Color Institute vice president Laurie Pressman said in a statement.

Even if you don’t have any plans to design or redecorate something in the near future, a quick glance at some of the new colors’ names—Summer Sand, Moonstone, and Gold Flake, for instance—could easily inspire you to do so. Or, in the case of Chocolate Fudge or Cinnamon Swirl, they might just make you hungry.

Wondering what goes into the creation of new colors? Take a look behind the scenes at the Pantone Color Institute here.

[h/t House Beautiful]

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