Sky Study with a Shaft of Sunlight John Constable (1776–1837) The Fitzwilliam Museum

By the time December folds in on itself, the days have begun their slow collapse. Light is fleeting and evenings arrive early and heavy as a rain cloud that has been carrying too much for too long. It’s the time of year when our psychological climate is shared festive air, December does more than darken; it presses in.

During the pandemic, we learned how we can build a shelter inside collective thoughts and actions, a clap, a sourdough starter, they were improvised breathing spaces and collective coping rituals. Small pockets of atmosphere where we could look at one another and say, without speaking, I feel it too.

People will always find each other in the storm.

The weather we made, that has unsettled, delighted, and occupied people most this week comes with it’s own barometer, It’s a shade, a hue. Cloud Dancer 11-4201, Pantone’s Colour of the Year.

I’ll admit, I’m predisposed to love a white, after six years peeling layer after layer of wallpaper off an old house, with patterns my mind could never settle against, I trust whites. They don’t compete with the view, they enhance, especially the way light lands on them, and moves in its own choreography across the walls. Before I leaned into the collective appraisal, I recieved Cloud Dancer like a soft clearing in a cluttered year.

“A Whisper of Tranquility and Peace in a Noisy World” Pantone

The internet darkened, quickly, it matched meteorological weather rolling in from the edges of a field. Within hours, the colour card had become a pressure valve. “Brain fog white.” “Pollution white.” “The inside of burnout.” “A migraine trying to be polite.” The responses were sharp. It was a collective exhale from people who had been holding their breath far too long. A cloud forming itself faster than anyone expected.

Perhaps the reaction was sharper because of the year we’ve lived through, where pause, hesitation, and gaps for wondering have been edited out. AI offered answers before we had even realised we were forming questions. In these uncertain times, certainty, any certainty became the cultural default, as if slowness itself had become suspect because ambiguity is inefficiency.

Cloud Dancer’s neutrality waiting to be filled by someone else’s certainty. It looked emptied-out, as if it had been cleared to make room for more information, more optimisation, more output.

For all our attempts to measure how colour “moves” us, the evidence refuses to stay still. Meaning making is the colour wash we apply. Red signals danger in one setting and luck in another; white signifies purity at British weddings and grief at Japanese funerals; blue calms some nervous systems and agitates others depending on history, brightness, or the company it keeps. Even the studies I love to cite, the ones suggesting coffee tastes stronger when drunk from a red cup fracture under scrutiny. Change the cultural group, the lighting, the branding, the expectations, even the day of the week, and the effect changes entirely. The coffee stays the same, the story changes because colour psychology is narrative work. And that narrative meaning is not inside the colour, it is pressed in by us. Cloud Dancer landed on top of everything we were already carrying.

And perhaps that’s what made my mind drift toward Constable the observer who spent summers “skying” on Hampstead Heath, sketching clouds that refused to sit still. His Sky Study with a Shaft of Sunlight captures meteorology and mood: light breaking, cloud thickening, atmosphere gathering its own emotional charge. He believed you couldn’t paint a sky in more than two hours because the sky would betray you by changing. Constable understood, atmosphere moves through us, not for us.

Each December, Pantone the organisation positions itself as the custodian of collective mood, the emotional climate for the year ahead. Psychologically speaking, this creates a high-status identity group of interpreters: trend forecasters, semioticians, designers fluent in chromatic psychology, and then there is the rest of us with our armchair opinions and lived experience.

And here’s what we know, people do not enjoy being handed a mood they didn’t choose. Social Identity Theory tells us groups resist imposed identity, especially when it arrives from outside the group and claims to represent the group as a whole. The backlash to Cloud Dancer was almost certainly identity-driven. We grabbed the colour card and repurposed it.

After a year that has felt overwrought, Cloud Dancer’s softness read less like comfort and more like evasion, a refusal to acknowledge the weather building in us. Without knowing it, we all stood with our face to the sky, waiting for someone to name the heaviness, the static accumulating under the surface. Pantone, offered that blank onto which collective frustration could condense into something charged and visible.

We press ourselves into the hue, asking it to hold what we cannot always hold alone and this does not make Cloud Dancer the colour of the year, it was the weather we made together, where, briefly, we could see ourselves as partially choregoraphed dancers moving through the storm, not around it. Identity is always co-authored, we find ourselves by finding the groups who breathe the same atmosphere, but this year has made that search harder, AI has taught us to erase pauses, to outrun hesitation, to speed our learning and aquisitioon of knowledge, and treat wondering as inefficiency. Cloud Dancer showed us the psychological cost of that acceleration, we aren’t meant to live without gaps. The dirty cloud that signals the storm isn’t the problem; it’s the weather we share that tells us who we are.