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How the modern world turned gray (and why color may be coming back)
2026-Apr-06, Monday 22:26![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray.
Well, gray-ish. From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.
Dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®
But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the neutral shelf? Why does the average house in this great and varied nation look like it’s been dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®?
The answer is a phenomenon dubbed “the grayening”: a gradual but relentless draining of pigment, not just from exteriors but also from interiors and from the stuff of everyday life, like cars and phones. In 2020, researchers at the Science Museum Group in London found evidence of the trend’s longevity. Feeding roughly 7,000 photographs of everyday objects — kettles, lamps, cameras — from the late 1800s to 2020 into an algorithm, they then asked it to track color distribution over time.
The result: a striking shift toward achromatic — that is, neutral — colors in material culture.
The grayening has accelerated in the 21st century, but it has ideological roots in the 20th, and industrial ones in the 19th.
The muted lingua franca of global commerce
Early 19th-century objects tended toward natural material colors: the warm brown of wood and leather, the yellows and brass tones of metals. Over time, those pigmentations surrendered steadily to black, white, and gray.
The shift was slow but steady, and its cumulative effect was massive. By the late 20th century, grayscale had colonized and dominated a wide range of object categories. To a large extent, this desaturation is a byproduct of mass production. Industrial manufacturing favors repeatability. Neutral tones are easier to standardize, less likely to clash, and more globally marketable than a particular shade of tangerine, which may sell brilliantly in Seville but offend everyone in Seoul.
In that sense, grayscale is the muted lingua franca of global commerce: inoffensive because it says nothing at all. But the grayening is more than simply an accident of industrialization. In the early 20th century, it got a powerful philosophical boost from modernist design ideology.
“Suited to simple races, peasants and savages”
In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Austrian architect Adolf Loos argued that ornamentation was not merely unnecessary, but a sign of arrested moral development. Truly evolved people, he suggested, would gravitate toward clean lines and plain surfaces. Applied ornament, including the use of color as decoration, didn’t enhance; it cluttered and distracted.
Loos’s polemical target was Art Nouveau, then in full frothy bloom. His arguments were influential on the Bauhaus school of art, which canonized restraint and straight lines. It, in turn, informed the International Style that swept global architecture from the 1930s onward, a style that favored glass, steel, and concrete. All gray: not just by default, but as a statement of seriousness.
Le Corbusier, pioneer of what we now simply call modern architecture, made the point with characteristic charm, declaring that color “is suited to simple races, peasants and savages.” Ouch.
The desaturation didn’t stop at buildings. Car colors have been meticulously catalogued since the dawn of the automotive age, making them a useful proxy for the broader culture’s chromatic pulse. Black had its first heyday as a car color about a century ago, when Henry Ford famously quipped that his Model T was available “in any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.”
The last, best decade for bold car colors
Like many good stories, it’s only partly true. The early Model T also came in gray, blue, green, and red. Ford narrowed the selection to black in 1914 for reasons that were purely industrial: oven-baked black paint dried faster, speeding the production line; it was more durable than other paints; and it was cheaper, helping to bring the price of a “Tin Lizzie” down from $780 in 1910 to $290 in 1924.
Colors also returned in the final years (1926–‘27) of the Model T, which had sold 15 million units by the time production ended — a cumulative industry record that stood for 45 years, until the VW Beetle surpassed it in 1972.
That Beetle had a good chance of being brightly colored, for the 1970s were the last, best decade for bold car colors, with audaciously named hues like Plum Crazy Purple, Lemon Twist, and Hugger Orange livening up the lots.
Earlier decades had their own distinctive palettes: soft pastels and bold two-tones on 1950s cars, jewel tones through the 1960s, and a rich, earthy greenness in the 1990s.
Then, around the turn of the millennium, car colors took a hard right onto Monochrome Avenue and never looked back. In 2004, roughly 60% of new cars sold in the U.S. were achromatic, meaning black, white, gray, or silver. By 2023, that figure had reached 80%. In 2011, white became the single most popular car color worldwide, a position it still holds today.
A self-reinforcing cycle of blandness
The latest global data, from BASF’s annual Color Report, shows white at 38% of new cars produced in 2025, black at 23%, gray at 19%, and silver at 8%. That colorless quartet accounts for 88% of all new cars on the planet. The most popular color worldwide is blue, at just 6%. Green and red each manage 3%.
The logic behind this near-total surrender is once again financial. Car paint production is expensive, and unusual colors reduce the chance that a vehicle will be sold. So manufacturers rationalize their palettes to a dozen safe tones per model, max. Large institutional buyers — rental companies, fleet operators — reinforce that conservative streak, because they too must eventually bulk-sell whatever they bulk-buy. The result? A self-reinforcing cycle of blandness.
A similar calculus applies to houses and house paints. As any estate agent will tell you, neutral colors maximize the resale value of your house because they offend the fewest buyers. There may well be a future home owner out there who shares your passion for aubergine — but betting on them being in the market precisely when you’re selling is a pretty big gamble, and with one of the most expensive assets you’re ever likely to own.
And so the houses of America, and much of the world, are painted in Agreeable Gray, Mindful Gray, Accessible Beige, and their many relatives from the neutral shelf. Note what these names actually signal: not This is who I am, but Please, don’t mind me. Agreeable Gray — the top choice in Alabama, Arizona, and the Carolinas — doesn’t so much describe a color as a social posture.
How minimalism became an aspirational identity
Color-wise, the whole world seems stuck in neutral these days. Call it late-stage modernism. The narrowing of the palette that started with industrialization and became part of modernist ideology in the early 20th century, morphed into a lifestyle choice in the early 21st.
The cultural coup de grâce came around 2010, when minimalism was elevated from an aesthetic to an aspirational identity. “Millennial gray” became a form of conspicuous restraint that signaled sophistication. And no object embodied that shift better than the iPhone.
Apple’s earlier iMac computers were available in such translucent, almost aggressively cheerful colors as Bondi Blue, Tangerine, Strawberry, and Grape. The company’s current product lineup comes primarily in Space Gray, Silver, Gold, and Midnight Black.
Color has migrated to a new, virtual reality
So this is where practicality, resale values, and modernist ideology have gotten us: to a material world that is so drained of color that it might depress the hell out of even Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier.
Interestingly, studies suggest there’s something to that colloquial association between gray and depression. Researchers at the University of Manchester tested healthy volunteers, people with anxiety, and people with depression, asking each to choose a color that represents their current mood. Yellow dominated among healthy subjects. Among both anxious and depressed participants, gray monopolized the top spots — with participants describing it as representing “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or a disinterest in life.” The researchers cited previous studies that found depressed people tend to describe life as “monochromatic” or as having “lost its color.”
But the world is darkest — or grayest — just before the dawn. There are signs that the grayening has peaked. As their colors of the year 2025, Pantone chose Mocha Mousse, a warm brown; Behr selected Rumors, a deep ruby red; and Valspar picked Encore, a rich navy blue. Design professionals are noting rising demand for terracotta- and clay-inspired hues.
In car colors, green made little but steady progress in 2025, doubling to 4% in the Americas, overtaking red in Europe. Axalta Coating Systems named Evergreen Sprint, a dark green, its 2025 global car color of the year, and General Motors added Typhoon Metallic, a similar hue, to its palette for the Cadillac CT4 and CT5 models.
And it is worth noting that color has migrated to a new, albeit virtual reality. Our devices may be Space Gray or Midnight Black, but what they project at us is a continuous, attention-grabbing, kaleidoscopic riot of color.
And even that may be a transitional arrangement. History points to the cyclical nature of chromatic preferences. The glorious excesses of the Baroque, for instance, were preceded — and followed — by periods of relative restraint. Who knows: Whatever succeeds the iPhone may be available in Bondi Blue, or Plum Crazy Purple.
Strange Maps #1289
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This article How the modern world turned gray (and why color may be coming back) is featured on Big Think.
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