Pantone’s 2026 color of the year is historic and, technically, not a color at all — meet Cloud Dancer, the first-ever white shade to receive the designation from the world’s color authority.
The choice is not a matter of “defaulting to white,” says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. Instead, Cloud Dancer signifies a blank canvas, “opening up new avenues and ways of thinking.”
Even though Pantone loves to zig when others zag, the shade of white is a curious, even shocking, choice during a cultural moment that scorns neutrals. The warm color palettes of the ’90s are back, minimalism is in retreat, sad beige is a pejorative, and the Great Gray-ification that loomed over more than a decade of design is on the run. What does Cloud Dancer mean in such a moment?
Turns out, it means whatever you want it to. “This is a structural color that goes well with anything and everything,” says Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute. “Whether you are including it with bright colors, whether you are including it with pastels, it works.”
White in decor is the ultimate neutral, but in a year filled with news about rising white nationalism, proclaiming a white the color of 2026 might raise some eyebrows.
“Skin tones did not factor into this at all,” Pressman says, noting that Pantone has fielded such questions for previous color choices. “With Peach Fuzz and then with Mocha Mousse, people were weighing in and asking if this was about skin tones. And I think we were going, ‘Wow, really?’ Because for us it’s really about, at such a basic level, what are people looking for that color can hope to answer?”
Since the new millennium, Pantone has crowned one of its shades the color of the year each December. The practice began with a simple press release, though over time it has spawned an entire cottage industry of merchandise and brand partnerships (Cloud Dancer Post-its, anyone?), as well as copycat proclamations from most paint companies.
In 2023, Pantone contended that we the people called for the bold Viva Magenta to shake us out of our post-pandemic stupor. By 2024, however, we sought Peach Fuzz to soothe our fractured world, which brought us to 2025’s Mocha Mousse, an attempt to marry comfort with luxury.
Cloud Dancer, otherwise known as Pantone 11-4201, is a “whisper of calm in a noisy world,” Eiseman says.
But if you want to break down the shade with less metaphoric language, “it’s a softer white,” Pressman says. “It’s not a pristine white, it’s not a technical white, it’s not a white that if we think about when we came out of covid, where people were looking for these very optically brightened white. This is intentionally a softer white, a white that is not bleached, a very natural-looking white.”
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