Colors make us happy

Colors make us happy
Understanding how outside factors — like current
events and the economy — make a season's hot hues cool

We know you know it already: Vanilla walls are so out,
beige is so last decade, color — whether it's bright and punchy or soft and
subtle — is so in.
And as those dear designers keep telling us, bringing
color to a room is the quickest, cheapest way of transforming it: a lick of
paint, a few throws, a smattering of pillows. Easy, right?
Well, not quite.
Even if it is just a $25 pot of paint or a $20 cushion, color is still an
investment, and somehow having a multitude of color choices makes it an
increasingly difficult decision.
So we garnered the wisdom of some of the
country's color experts and forecasters — people who spend their lives
determining what colors we will favor, based on the mood of the country, the
economy and world events.
This year, there are lots of comfort colors and
colors that make us happy. Next year, expect colors that will reflect another
shift in mind-set: to self-sufficiency, getting our hands dirty and expanding
our education.
Here's what they're telling us:
• Think exotic
"stay-cations": If we can't visit exotic countries ourselves, we can at least
bring them home. Oranges, turquoises and teals — jewel tones from India, Turkey
and China — will continue to be bright accents.
• Goodbye bling: Even the
richest among us don't want to be ostentatious anymore. Metallics will be warmer
— silvers with a touch of gold, champagne colors and nothing flashy.
• Light
sand, dark aubergine and chalky grays: We're becoming more grounded, living with
less, growing our own vegetables and appreciating what we've got, and these
back-to-nature colors reflect it.
• Old-fashioned living: There's a new
mind-set of sharing, getting to know your neighbors and being part of a
community. So retro greens, harking back to the 1940s and '50s, are coming into
vogue.
• Just plain white: Thanks to improvements in materials technology,
white is showing up in furniture finishes, kitchens, and it's popular in the
boardroom, too.
• Gray matters: Gray is the popular new neutral, feeding
largely off the trend for stainless steel. It's classy, especially up against
yellows or whites.
• Violet, purple, mauve and more: Purple was a hot
fashion trend last fall, and it's now entrenched, both as an accent color and,
more washed-out, as a neutral violet. Also in is mauve, as an accent and a
neutral.
The meeting of colorful minds
How many people does it take to
forecast a trend? In the world of color, the answer is several hundred.
Every year, between 200 and 300 people gather somewhere in North America to
talk about what colors will be popular in the worlds of home, retail, gadgets
and cars in the next 18 months and beyond.
Over the course of three days,
they gather in workshops and committees, throwing around "dirty whites" and
"grayed-out browns" and arguing over the particular shade of yellow that might
crop up on everything from skirt patterns to kitchen blenders.
Research
shows that around 65 percent of a consumer's purchasing decision is based on
color and packaging, says Jaime Stephens. "Color sells, and the right color
sells better. Statistics show that the wrong color doesn't sell at all."
Stephens is executive director of the Color Marketing Group, a 600-strong
organization that hosts these annual meetings, plus more worldwide. CMG is made
up of color design professionals worldwide, from car manufacturing companies to
paint companies to color consulting firms.
And while it's tempting to think
of them as a bunch of luvvies, bandying around ideas like they're straight from
a women's magazine conference in the TV hit "Absolutely Fabulous," there's a
difference. These people aren't the ones cooing over copies of Vogue and
admiring each other's purses, but the ones the magazine editors and handbag
retailers look to for their own guidance.
So how do they do it?
Color
consultant Kiki Titterud says they look to world events that might influence
people culturally, as well as other trend reports like economic forecasts. "When
they announce where the next Olympics is going to be held, a world event like
that is going to impact almost every country and almost every culture."
In
the run-up to last year's presidential election, America's population had been
showing signs of either shifting or overlapping political parties, two parties
whose colors are red and blue. "If you mix red and blue you get purple," says
Titterud. And the result has been a trend towards purple.
Other trends are
less subtle. Bright turquoises, teals, oranges and reds — another set of popular
colors this year — signify optimism and also exotic vacations in places we can't
all afford to visit.
CJ Volk, a CMG member in Tucson and owner of her own
paint brand, Citron Paint, says they're going on hunches, too. The CMG members
are experienced colorists, many of them artists or former artists, and they
simply have a knack for it, she says.
Her own visits to European trade shows
or shopping trips in Paris have highlighted color trends that have emerged a
year or so later in the mainstream. "Sometimes I couldn't justify it. I just
knew it."

vir. http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/301289