What color is your 2022?
“PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri helps us to embrace this altered landscape of possibilities, opening us up to a new vision as we rewrite our lives.”
I have never been so convinced that a color could change my life as I was when I read the description of Pantone’s 2022 Color of the Year. Pantone’s description goes on to note that Very Peri is a new color “whose courageous presence encourages personal inventiveness and creativity.”
Feeling courageous and encouraged, I’ve thrown myself into finding everything Very Peri—pens, paint color, t-shirts, and coffee mugs.
But I can’t find a pen anywhere, and the coffee mug is sold out. As is the expresso cup. And the cortado cup (though I am not sure how to make cortado). Pantone doesn’t offer a wine glass.
I keep returning to Pantone’s website to click the “out of stock” button on the mug in hopes that one will make its way into stock and, therefore, into my cart. I have visions of myself drinking cortado (or whatever) from my Very Peri cortado cup during upcoming Zoom meetings and smirking at all the silent black boxes (that don’t have Very Peri cortado cups) while thinking, “Yeah, you know my courageous presence encourages inventiveness and creativity.”
Because it does. The color of my 2022 is Very Peri.
Displaying a carefree confidence and a daring curiosity,…PANTONE 17-3938 Very Peri is a symbol of the global zeitgeist of the moment and the transition we are going through.
2022 wasn’t always so daring and curious. For a couple of days, my color for 2022 was Jade Green.
On my desk, I have a polished stone in that dark bluey-green and thought it was a good inspiration piece to hold in front of me for the year—shiny, smooth, solid. Digging through my Tombow set (Pantone’s country cousin), I found a Jade Green marker and was all behind Tombow 379’s “convenient double-sided design" (Tombow doesn’t do much to sell their colors), but then I realized my zeitgeist is not solid conveniences—I wish to embody and live in an “altered landscape of possibilities.”
Color of the Year Or Word of the Year?
Now, ironically—or perhaps not—as a writer, poet, and general lover, hoarder, and privileger of words, I place the “word of the year” practice somewhere between bland and boring. It’s either meh or okay. I don’t really care which.
Finding a word of the year has become so pervasive that the quest has a social media-approved acronym, “What’s your WOTY?” Most people chose shiny abstractions: truth, growth, balance, resilience, intentional. Words like pretty gems that can be worn as a bracelet for everyone to see.
But what do these words feel like? How do you visualize them? What do they do?
Pantone says the color of the year practice establishes a “moment in time that provides strategic direction.” Apparently, for most, green is the strategic moment for 2022.
Benjamin Moore says the color of the year is October Mist 1495. …the silvery-green stem of a flower waiting to bloom…
Behr thinks you should paint everything Breezeway …sea glass green…peace and tranquility for forward movement…
Sherwin Williams wants to make everything Evergreen Fog …a simple but sophisticated wash of beautiful…
Etsy says the hottest color will be Emerald Green …symbolizing harmony and growth, along with royalty and refinement…
And green makes sense. Green is where I started, though jaded. We want a fresh start in 2022—new, verdant, washed of our experiences. Rebirth. That grass over there.
Pantone’s color for 2020 (selected in late 2019) was Classic Blue, “a recognizable, reliable color [that] presents a foil to the uncertainty the future holds.” Eerily prescient, no? Unfortunately, crayon box blue wasn’t familiar and sturdy enough to foil Covid.
In 2021, Pantone selected two colors, grey and yellow to convey:
A message of happiness supported by fortitude, the combination of PANTONE 17-5104 Ultimate Gray + PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating is aspirational and gives us hope. We need to feel that everything is going to get brighter – this is essential to the human spirit.
How does 2022 inspire you?
Actually, for all my meh-ing the WOTY trend, I do have one for 2022. It’s liberation, and it’s one of those annoying words that defines itself with itself—liberation is the “act of being liberated.” How the hell does that help me understand what it means? Regardless, I wrote it all over everything in the waning days of 2021.
I know I want liberation in 2022, and now, at least, I know what liberation looks like. It looks Very Peri.
Want to find your color of the year and use it to personalize 2022?
Join me on January 30 for a Zoom workshop in which we’ll discover words, images, and sensory moments through which you’ll Embody 2022.
