My 2026 Colour of the Year
Well, all the big boys have heaved their “Colour” of the year upon us.
For paint companies it’s not just a single colour, it’s more a colour with a whole bunch of other colours thrown into the soup.
After all, it would be folly to place all of ones coloured eggs into one basket. If you’ll pardon my mixing of metaphors.
2025 culminated in a bit of colour rage and blowback with Pantone announcing a stark, cold and, let’s face it, boring, white as their colour of the year.
Now, the time has come for this one woman colour consultation show to alter the world of colour with her very own announcement of my…
2026 Colour of the Year!
Hold onto your hats, bucko.
MY COLOUR OF THE YEAR IS CALLED: AUTHENTICITY
It’s whatever goddamn colour makes you happy,
makes you tick,
makes you feel good,
makes your house look better.
It’s whatever colour is an expression of your unique self - so, you know, make it a good one!
As a Colour Consultant I know I’m not for everybody. I tend to follow the dictum of Dorothy Draper, “show me nothing that looks like gravy”. Or, Iris Apfel, “color can raise the dead”.
In 2023 and 2025 I went to the trouble of putting together several colour palettes for house exteriors and put these into blogs on my website. The exterior colours for 2025 has the highest number of hits on my site, edging ahead of my landing page. The colour palettes for 2023 comes in third. (I don’t know why I didn’t do one for 2024, I’m not necessarily a very disciplined person.)
So you’d think I’d be inclined to put together several different combinations for 2026, hmmm, nope.
But Kora!, you might say, you’re a Colour Consultant, colour is your business and all of those hits on your website, are you nutso!? Perhaps, but let’s take a closer look.
While the 2023 & 2025 colour blogs place numbers one and three in hits, they also have both a high bounce rate and a high exit rate. This means people land on the page and then leave, they don’t look at other pages on my website. Clearly these people ARE looking for gravy. I’m not the gal for them. My landing page may come in second place for hits but the bounce and exit rates are much lower, which means that people continue to look at my site and explore further pages, which is what I want.
However, I don’t think it’s just that. I think there’s more to it, I think people are getting a tad fed up with the cavalcade of people now touting their own colour/colours of the year.
It’s gotten to the point now where pretty much every colour is someone’s colour of the year, so what’s the point.
I also think the world, and people, are changing. I feel that more and more people don’t want what someone else is telling them they want, they want what THEY want.
More people are shopping local, more people are finding niche businesses to support.
In a world of fakery, more people are looking for Authenticity.
And, frankly, so am I.
So, I’m stepping away from the game. I’m on the Authenticity team and my gut tells me it’s the winning team.
Am I still going to help people choose paint colours? You bet, but I already know that how I do it is going to change in some way.
The first thing is, I’m going to stop calling myself a Colour Consultant, I hate the word consultant, it’s a dumb sounding, corporate mouth full. I’m not sure yet what I’ll change it to, it seems to me the correct word doesn’t actually exist, but that’s okay, I’ll figure it out and make it work.
In the meantime, if you want to turn this… INTO THIS!
or you want to turn this… INTO THIS!
You know where to find me.