ART! Pantone’s Peach Fuzz captures our need for nurture as 25th annual Color of the Year for ’24

What is PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz? It is described by Pantone as “a velvety gentle peach whose all-embracing spirit enriches heart, mind, and body”. They say it “captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others.”

In seeking a hue that echoes our innate yearning for closeness and connection, Pantone says they chose a color radiant with warmth and modern elegance. A shade that resonates with compassion, offers a tactile embrace, and effortlessly bridges the youthful with the timeless.

Pantone says: “Subtly sensual, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz is a heartfelt peach hue bringing a feeling of kindness and tenderness, communicating a message of caring and sharing, community and collaboration. A warm and cozy shade highlighting our desire for togetherness with others or for enjoying a moment of stillness and the feeling of sanctuary this creates, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz presents a fresh approach to a new softness.

An appealing peach hue softly nestled between pink and orange, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz inspires belonging, recalibration, and an opportunity for nurturing, conjuring up an air of calm, offering us a space to be, feel, and heal and to flourish from. Drawing comfort from PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz, we can find peace from within, impacting our wellbeing. An idea as much as a feeling, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz awakens our senses to the comforting presence of tactility and cocooned warmth. Sensitive but sweet and airy, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz evokes a new modernity.

While centered in the human experience of enriching and nurturing the mind, body, and soul, it is also a quietly sophisticated and contemporary peach with depth whose gentle lightness is understated but impactful, bringing beauty to the digital world. Poetic and romantic, a clean peach tone with a vintage vibe, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz reflects the past yet has been refashioned with a contemporary ambiance.

Why was Peach Fuzz chosen?

At a time of turmoil in many aspects of our lives, our need for nurturing, empathy and compassion grows ever stronger as does our imaginings of a more peaceful future. We are reminded that a vital part of living a full life is having the good health, stamina, and strength to enjoy it. That in a world which often emphasizes productivity and external achievements, it is critical we recognize the importance of fostering our inner selves and find moments of respite, creativity, and human connection amid the hustle and bustle of modern life.

As we navigate the present and build toward a new world, we are reevaluating what is important. Reframing how we want to live, we are expressing ourselves with greater intentionality and consideration. Recalibrating our priorities to align with our internal values, we are focusing on health and wellbeing, both mental and physical, and cherishing what’s special — the warmth and comfort of spending time with friends and family, or simply taking a moment of time to ourselves.

With that in mind, we wanted to turn to a color that could focus on the importance of community and coming together with others. The color we selected to be our Pantone Color of the Year 2024 needed to express our desire to want to be close to those we love and the joy we get when allowing ourselves to tune into who we are and just savor a moment of quiet time alone. It needed to be a color whose warm and welcoming embrace conveyed a message of compassion and empathy. One that was nurturing and whose cozy sensibility brought people together and elicited a feeling of tactility. One that reflected our feeling for days that seemed simpler but at the same time has been rephrased to display a more contemporary ambiance. One whose gentle lightness and airy presence lifts us into the future.

How are the colors chosen?

The Pantone Color Institute originally created the Pantone Color of the Year educational program in 1999 to engage the design community and color enthusiasts around the world in a conversation around color. We wanted to draw attention to the relationship between culture and color — to highlight to our audience how what is taking place in our global culture is expressed and reflected through the language of color. 

Through the years the Pantone Color of the Year program has become a globally iconic cultural touchstone, capturing the imagination of so many designers, brands, and consumers. 

As we celebrate the 25th year of our Pantone Color of the Year program and the fundamental role color plays in our shared human experience, it is our hope that we have inspired you to look at color in a different way — that color and its connection to emotion and the expression of human feelings will take on a new significance, causing your eye to linger a little longer throughout the day on the tints and tones that surround you, as history unfolds from moment to moment. 

Cerulean Blue was the first Pantone Color of the Year in 1999

Since we introduced PANTONE 15-4020 Cerulean Blue as the first Pantone Color of the Year in 1999, we have seen this program influence product development and purchasing decisions in nearly every industry and country around the world. Growing in popularity each year, its impact is felt across fashion, color cosmetics, home furnishings, automotive and industrial design, as well as product, packaging, multimedia design, and commercial interiors.We are grateful to have provided an avenue where designers and color enthusiasts all over the world feel empowered to tell their own stories through the language of color and showcase their creativity within their communities. We look forward to continuing this for many more years to come.

To arrive at the selection each year, our team of global color experts at the Pantone Color Institute comb the world looking for new color influences. This can include the entertainment industry and films in production, traveling art collections and new artists, fashion, all areas of design, aspirational travel destinations, new lifestyles, playstyles, or enjoyable escapes, as well as socio-economic conditions. Influences may also stem from new technologies, materials, textures, and effects that impact color, relevant social media platforms, and even upcoming sporting events that capture worldwide attention. 

Anything and everything taking place in our culture during the year can influence our Pantone Color of the Year selections, with each source carrying a different weight from year to year depending on what’s taking place in our culture at that time. For example, if you look back to 15 years ago, technology would have played an infinitesimal role. Today that is no longer the case. Gaming, social media, augmented and virtual reality, and physical design itself are all influenced by our technology and the colors we can access in the digital environment. 

How does the selection process work? How does Pantone decide the Color of the Year every year?

The Pantone Color of the Year selection process entails thoughtful consideration and trend analysis. It is a culmination of the macro-level color trend forecasting and research that the global team involved with the Pantone Color Institute conducts year-round that informs this selection, as well as the colors that get included into our color trend forecasting products. 

We approach our color selection in a very pure way. No one on our global team comes to any Pantone Color of the Year discussion with a commercial agenda or personal preferences. Instead, we each approach our Pantone Color of the Year color selection in a very pure way. As we like to say, “we love all of our colors equally.” 

There’s also a misconception that we gather a bunch of color influencers in a room one day and emerge with the decision. As many of our Pantone Color Institute team members own their own design studios, contribute to key influential global trend forecasts, work with clients prescribing color choices for brand or product visual identity, and even teach classes on color, their daily conversations are rooted in color and design, including material and surface finish. 

As a result, conversations relating to the Pantone Color of the Year selection do not take place in one isolated meeting at a specific time of year. It is one long, continuously flowing conversation among a group of color-attuned people.  Our Pantone Color Institute team members come from a wide range of design, cultural, and geographical backgrounds. The commonality that brings them together is their expertise in color and design, and their ability to see the world through the lens of color. That’s why I liken them to being color anthropologists. They have this intuitive ability to connect all that is taking place in the world and translate it into the language of color.

What’s especially fascinating to me about the Pantone Color of the Year selection process is that although our Pantone Color Institute members reside in disparate locations and are involved in differing areas of design, we are always able to come to a consensus.

Sure, there are different perspectives that come up and we carefully look at them all, but because the Pantone Color of the Year reflects what is taking place in our global culture at that moment in time, many of our observations and what we see visually showing up can be quite similar. We discuss our color psychology and color trend research as we look to connect the mood of the global zeitgeist with the corresponding color family. From there, we drill down further to identify the exact right shade.

It is always a challenging process and sometimes we need to look at alternative ways to express our color message. For Pantone Color of the Year 2016 and Pantone Color of the Year 2021, we brought together two colors to tell our story.

We also consider the color name in our selection process as names immediately conjure up an image and a feeling. We want to make sure that the name of our Pantone Color of the Year resonates and can easily and intuitively convey the message we are looking to send.