We All Need More Yellow in Our Lives
By: Tina L. Smith
Tags: Life Lessons, Visual Design, Home, Style, Culture

CULTURAL MOOD

We All Need More Yellow in Our Lives

Pantone’s colors of the year, 2021: Illuminating and Ultimate Gray. (Image/Pantone Color Institute)

When we moved into our last house, one of the 1950s bathrooms was completely yellow. Every surface. Walls, counter, floor, tub, sink, toilet, toilet paper holder,…you name it. It was too much. And I still contend that decorating a bathroom solely in the color of urine is not a good idea.

So, we remodeled it…to cobalt blue and white.

I never used yellow in any decorating. I found it too dated, too garish, too, well, sunny.

Let the sun shine in

About 10 years ago, home design started heading down a path of ubiquitous “warm gray” walls, white kitchens, and “modern farmhouse.” People actually started nailing cheap wood from pallets to their walls to create the look.

From what I hear, those trends, which were spurred on by popular home decorating TV shows, are going away, along with “word art,” which can’t come soon enough for me. (No, I’m not ever going to put inspirational decals on my walls or label rooms. Why do we need laundry rooms to be captioned “LAUNDRY”? Do we think we’ll forget what room we’re in? I love words more than most people, but words are not art. Not to me, anyhow.)

Gray has overtaken room decor and held a stranglehold on it for too long. Yes, it can be calming and neutral, but a house full of gray is boring. Whereas the early 2000s brought us a little toooooo much color (remember the weekly travesties that took place on the TV show Trading Spaces, with blood red dining rooms and dark green kitchens?), the 2010s brought us a whole lot of blah. No interesting woodgrains, no vibrancy, no appreciation of brick, which had to be painted over.

Quintessential 2016 kitchen: more cowbell, er, gray! (Photo/The RTA Store)

Maybe it reflected something about us, this need for basic gray, the deletion of color. Maybe it was a time of rebellion from over-saturation of color, or a time of retreat from boldness. Maybe a need for restfulness. Who knows. All I know is it was dull.

It’s time for some balance. And it’s time for some sunshine.

Yellow + gray suits us

The Pantone Color Institute (the organization behind official color designations for the print industry since 1963) has named Illuminating (bright yellow) and Ultimate Gray as colors of the year for 2021.

According to Pantone’s press statement, Illuminating is associated with optimism and vivacity, while Ultimate Gray encourages “feelings of composure, steadiness and resilience.” In her own research into color associations, Eiseman has found that yellow is often associated with “cheer” and “happiness,” due to its correlation with the sun. A small peer-reviewed study from 2019, led by Swiss psychologist Domicele Jonauskaite, came to a similar conclusion. The study used music and images to induce particular moods in its 125 subjects, then asked them to choose colors to match their moods. Participants most often associated the color yellow with joy.

— CNN Style website, December 9, 2020

While Pantone kindly claims that gray elicits “resilience,” we all know what they mean. For much of the world, 2020 was the epitome of gray…gloomy, tragic, and lacking vibrancy. In fact, most mornings of my work-from-home adventure, I’ve felt exactly like gray. I think I’ve even started to look gray.

And 2021 won’t begin any differently. Although a vaccine is on its way, most of us won’t see that shot in our arm until spring or later. So the gray continues.

But now there’s hope. Our world will begin to return to normal in 2021. We will come out of our homes, see people, hug, reunite, rejoice. That’s the yellow. Warm, happy, brazen, joyful, and unapologetically bright.