57 ms·

Color has been disappearing from the world

356 points by beatthatflight 4y ago

wilg 4y ago
Fashion changes, but this is probably mostly confirmation bias. Don't worry about it, this is made-up and just encourages you to be nostalgic and fearful.
- yababa_y 4y ago
  so the dataset is completely bogus or what is your explanation for how this is made-up?
  - hasperdi 4y ago
    The dataset may not be bogus, but a lot of this fashion / what people like / what people think is good
- jefftk 4y ago
  How would this be confirmation bias?
t-3 4y ago
Black, white, and grey are also colors. The reason for their popularity is likely due to the modern aesthetics of simplicity and elegance. Bright colors give a "busy" appearance, they are gaudy and attention-grabbing. Emotionless, professional, and modest "inorganic" tones give the impression of maturity and sophistication.
- hulitu 4y ago
  And the dark is light /s
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  And Goths :)
- OGforces 4y ago
beardyw 4y ago
It's just fashion. People try to rationalise it because they don't like to think they are influenced by fashion. Those who really aren't are just perceived as weird.
funnym0nk3y 4y ago
For cars I assume one factor is resell value. "Neutral" colours seem to appeal to more people and thus selling a bright yellow car will either take you longer or won't get your as good of a price.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Funny. It's "I love bright colors but the next owner might not." Are we in fact collectively nerfing our color preferences based on a false assumption? I have been buying bright red and yellow cars for over a decade now (no problem reselling them, FWIW). The problem is that it is so hard to even find cars for sale from the manufacturer in bright colors. I think our tastes are being directed by marketing and bean counters making "safe bets". I feel like we've been driving office beiege for a few decades now.
  - d3ckard 4y ago
    I would always choose bright color, as I find it safer (more visible across weather conditions). It’s just hard to get them if you want a lease (and I don’t want to own a car - ever).
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ekianjo 4y ago
I blame Apple.
- omega3 4y ago
  Which is ironic considering what they were doing in the 90s with the iMac G3.
  - djmips 4y ago
    and their logo used to be a rainbow apple.
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      I feel like Cook & Co. have been bringing back the rainbow apple, no?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Apple is far exceeding every other competitor at providing color options.
randcraw 4y ago
Bright color is seen as upbeat, happy, optimistic. But we aren't.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  I've been scrolling looking for this. This, I think, is the actual correct take. Not resale value, or mass appeal which is a symptom. There have long been studies on the connection between societal optimism and color choice. The fashion industry and car industry in particular are trailing indicators for public sentiment on the state of the world. https://www.pcimag.com/blogs/14-pci-blog/post/104991-how-color-choices-echo-the-economic-climate-and-why-it-matters https://www.pcimag.com/blogs/14-pci-blog/post/104991-how-col...
unity1001 4y ago
- OOD 4y ago
  [dead]
Teelemii 4y ago
My flat is colorful my car is black. Any other car color would have cost extra which I was not willing to pay. 60-80 were weirdly colorful too bright for no particular reason. I don't think there is much to interpret into this.
- deleted 4y ago
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h2odragon 4y ago
Bright colors are an effort to stand out from the crowd. That no longer a laudable goal; now we admire the safe middle of the herd. Don't be unique, don't be unusual, don't be noticed.
- nicbou 4y ago
  I think it's fine not to express ourselves through consumption. That aside, neutral colours are just more practical. They're easier to match, easier to clean, and suit more occasions. It's more economical all around.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    And the purpose of life is, of course, economic efficiency. /s
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  As per the Normcore Manifesto [1], refusing to try rebel when society encourages you to really is the greatest form of rebellion. "If the rule is Think Different, being seen as normal is the scariest thing... Which paradoxically makes normalcy ripe for the überelites to adopt as their own, confirming their status by showing how disposable the trappings of uniqueness are. The most different thing to do is to reject being different all together. When the fringes get more and more crowded, Mass Indie turns toward the middle. Having mastered difference, the truly cool attempt to master sameness." [1]: http://khole.net/issues/youth-mode/ http://khole.net/issues/youth-mode/
  - asutekku 4y ago
    I like normcore as a trend but this is just someone trying to justify the trend and trying to make it more meaningful than what it actually is.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    This reads like vanilla trying to convince the world that it's really the edgy one.
Tanoc 4y ago
There's a couple of reasons why. None of them are particularly pleasing. For one, it costs more money to dye the plastic or paint/anodize the metal. Everyone except children are going to buy the product based on function or need and companies have determined that the colour has no outsized effect on which one they choose. So it's cheaper to use basic black plastic and unpainted metal. The other is that for things like cars and furniture there's a resale factor. A car is a big investment, and you want as much money as possible to put towards the purchase of the next one. A bright colour like yellow might make you happy while you own it, but it will be difficult to sell to other people as it's a very loud and ostentatious colour. It's the same with furniture and home architecture. '70s patterns in carpet will reduce the resale value of a house because few people will be willing to adapt their furniture to match. For corporate environments it's about ease of repurposing the space and to be the least bit disruptive to where they're doing business. It'd cost a lot of money to remodel all the old red steel roof McDonald's if that lot were ever sold. In fact there are plenty of gable roof Pizza Huts that just got repainted after they were sold because remodeling the building cost too much money. McDonald's trend towards grey earth tones using metal and stone is so they can fit into big cities these days, especially in Europe and Asia. The coffeehouse aesthetic that Starbucks pioneered has proven especially attractive in those markets, and other companies are following suit by trying to use that same look to blend into modern five over ones and block highrises.
- stinos 4y ago
  The other is that for things like cars and furniture there's a resale factor. That's shifting the 'why' question to: why do people care more about resale value now than they did 20 years ago. I'd guess the reason would be the state of the economy? However a search for 'car color linked to economy' reveals other theories, like paint used: https://slate.com/culture/2011/10/car-paint-colors-why-are-so-many-cars-painted-white-silver-and-black.html https://slate.com/culture/2011/10/car-paint-colors-why-are-s...
  - macintux 4y ago
    I'd posit cars are lasting longer, and thus retaining their value, making resale more worthy of consideration than it might have been decades ago.
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jaredcwhite 4y ago
Ugh, that "modern" all-gray home decor style. I can't stand it. Not saying everything should be purple and gold and rainbows, but for the love of all that is good and decent in this world, please: it's OK to add some splashes of bright color in your home!!
- helmholtz 4y ago
  Key word being some. If everything is emphasized than nothing is. Growing up in India, I'd day good riddance to shouty colors and permanent visual overstimulation. Grey is calmn. Neutrals are calmn. Fuck colors.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      - rdlw 4y ago
        What is a "data driven opinion"? Do you mean a fact? What data drives your choice of favourite colour?
        imwillofficial 4y ago
        Data driven opinions are not facts. An opinion may be driven by incomplete or wrong data. I don’t expect people to only believe facts, that’s not fair, and I’m no impartial arbiter anyway. As for what data drives my favorite color, that’s actually a super interesting question. All I know is Orange is the best color, fact.
  - gausswho 4y ago
    Tragedy of the chromatic commons. Barren inoffense is maximum profit. Apartments go all white (with any tree that reducing light or view distance chopped down) and then it's on you to liven the place up.
jelliclesfarm 4y ago
i wanted to paint my garden shed red, but my elderly asian neighbour said that it would hurt her eyes. so i painted it purple and yellow. i would die without colour in my life. it is the one thing i miss most from back when i was younger. it is slightly better in california but it was positively depressing when i was living in new england. i think they have colour in their lives only once a year..during fall. the best colours come from nature. flowers, sunsets, birds are disappearing from our lives too. where are our green spaces in cities? why is our food drab and brown? i work with a tomato breeder and the one thing i learnt is that we still eat with our eyes. people pay more for colourful food. being attracted to colour is hardwired in most species. it is a mating and survival cue for most species. if we dont know how to recognise colour and categorise them, we couldnt have evolved to where we are now in our timeline. the wrong mushroom or berry would have killed the entire tribe drying up their gene pool. that we are ok with a lack of colour in our lives indicates that our flight/fight instincts are lax...our lives are safer, predictable, comfortable and less fraught with danger. my nervous system is primed for flight/fight. i feel ill at ease when there is no colour around me and i still perceive that as something to navigate with caution. i am always recording colours or details around me...a little recording whirring machine at the back of my mind is noting down everything in my environment to make me feel safer. it's silence and lack of colour that throws me off. eta: re: the original article... i think sensors and cameras and spectrascopes and all the other wonderful things tech has given us dont need colours. we can measure light and heat in other innumerable ways to harvest required data. a robot's eyes do not need to see like we do...as we automate most functions, colour can become unnecessary. practical example: we used to evaluate ripeness of produce with colour ...now we use a brix refractometer. why try to figure if tomatoes are picked ripe when you can save money and time by picking them unripe and ripen with ethylene gas...easily monitored for over ripening with floor ethylene detectors in large warehouses filled with crates of produce from floor to ceiling. we dont need colour because technology knows how to utilise all the data in the entire spectrum. colour is just a sliver of it.
ninefathom 4y ago
The article simply (and, one might argue, rather effectively) shows data; the comments here have been far more interesting. This seems to be a surprisingly polarizing (pun not intended) issue. Why are some people sanguine with the diminishing of color, yet others find it upsetting? Why is it a fashion trend to some, yet a crucial piece of identity to others? I don't know, but I'd love to find out. So here's my addition to the brew: urbanization. What if the trend is not entirely fashion or economy, but also a function of population density? I've spent my fair share of time in both urban and rural areas, and the urban seem to be much more chromatically homogeneous in terms of surface area, punctuated with more vivid splashes. Rural areas tend to lack the sudden bright splashes, but have miles upon miles of subtle variation. Could increasing population densities be contributing to a loss of color?
- yvan-eht-nioj 4y ago
  I remember being in Tokyo station at rush hour and seeing a sea of beige/pastels and white shirts, with the odd pop of bright colour (usually another tourist) - exactly as you mentioned, but in the form of a microcosm. I also remember noting that the effect of the homogeneity as being calming, generating serenity amidst what would otherwise be chaotic. Perhaps the trend towards homogenous colours are communal hive-mind response to 21st Century overstimulation, noise pollution and ever increasing urban density - a desperate grasp for less stimulation in a world of endless beeping, flashing and ringing.
  - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
    I don't not buy this, but seems kinda far fetched. but then again this explains why the trend is apparently increasing in speed. (but i feel like there's more photos from the later we go that there has to be some kind of normalisation for this date to actually make sense...)
    - deleted 4y ago
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  - deleted 4y ago
drannex 4y ago
That's my article, very interesting to see posted here!
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Great work, keep tha noggin workin!
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
- sjostrom7 4y ago
  The car color graph is very effective, nice work.
  - well_actulily 4y ago
    (Sauce) https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/j7yfqb/oc_car_color_distribution_broken_down_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/j7yfqb/oc_...
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I wonder if something can be deduced about people's opinion of the world/economy based on the colors (or at least the manufacturer's).
- wincy 4y ago
  I’m getting serious deja vu here, wasn’t this article posted a week or two ago? Edit: found it, this article was similar https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32468950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32468950
  - soundnote 4y ago
    Here's the Twitter original: https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976051860963333 https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976051860963333 Previous HN threads about the Twitter thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571 (215 comments, 27 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246181 (5 comments, 28 days ago)
janef0421 4y ago
Personally, I like the more muted colour palettes of modern design. It makes things less busy and highlights what colour does exist.
aaron695 4y ago
lbriner 4y ago
I wonder how much in houses is related to how frequently we re-furnish our houses compared to 50 years back. I know old people who have the same wallpaper and furniture that they had when they got married, "if it aint broke, don't fix it", the younger generation is now much more likely to. I have had 3 different sets of sofas/chairs in the last, perhaps, 7 years. Neutral colours means I can change the fittings to whatever I feel like. What I don't want to do is repaint everything to match.
- derbOac 4y ago
  I do think this is part of it. When I got married my spouse wanted a set of really bright-colored dishes. I liked them too, but was worried we'd get tired of them and want something else, and preferred neutral colors for that reason. Neutral colors aren't as appealing to me at some level but I'm also less likely to tire of them, and as you say, I think they're more compatible with other changes. I've wrestled with this in some recent remodeling too, thinking a blue would be nice here, but decided against it because I didn't want to change my mind later. But I was remodeling, so maybe it's inevitable anyway. I think so much is disposable in our lives that maybe we gravitate toward colors that seem less ephemeral.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I find with things like "plates" that the normal china/white/off-gray colors are fine. But with things like mixing bowls, measuring cups, etc, having bright colors is incredibly helpful if someone is in the kitchen with you - "give me the red cup" is easier to understand than "give me the 1-1/4 cup, no that other one over there".
  - jacooper 4y ago
    I personally bought a white phone once, it was the S10+, i did it because it was the flashy color and it was on every AD, also the Black sucked on that phone, there was no midnight black. After a couple of months, I regreted it, and my next phone was naturally black.
  - munificent 4y ago
foobarbecue 4y ago
https://youtu.be/Dhwcc-iiNJQ https://youtu.be/Dhwcc-iiNJQ
Theodores 4y ago
For shades of grey you just need titanium dioxide. It is white and not something people worry about if it is in food. For reasons I don't understand, many colours need fairly toxic chemicals. Just think of the names. Cadmium Yellow, Cobalt Blue - would you like a bit of strontium nitrate with that? Because we eat food and have children, we can't have all the colours that we used to have. We can't even have lead in paint these days. This is just one factor, and it supports my general belief that progress in fashion/art/design is technology driven. Regarding bland houses, what do you expect when the only people buying homes are doing so in order to rent seek/flip the property? Particularly when IKEA is just a short drive out of town. Cars is the same deal, paint technology has changed to be less toxic and people buying cars aren't buying them with their own money to own forever. They got to get that resale at the end.
- projektfu 4y ago
  Colors are often toxic because they need to have the ability to absorb many wavelengths and reflect or re-emit particular bands. Transition metals have lots of ability for electrons to move between oxidation states, allowing this absorbtion and re-emission, but many form toxic compounds. Similarly, aromatic compounds, especially those containing nitrogen, have this ability. Unfortunately many are toxic, and many of the less toxic ones fade in the light. That said, toxicity is relative to dose and dose depends on whether these things are free in the environment. A lot of things like cadmium dyes can be effectively trapped and are less toxic than other commonly used chemicals. Long-term, however, such as in a landfill, the story is not as simple. Notably, lead oxide paint was used because it was bright white. Titanium dioxide is not as good but obviously much safer.
  - Theodores 4y ago
    Do you mind if I ask you how you know this stuff and where I can get started? I really do want to know more about the chemicals in colours and why, with the history in there too. We get told what the colour wheel is and never what is in the paints when we are at school. I think we would value the materials more if we had any idea of how we got here.
slowmotiony 4y ago
"Sites which allow you to use the back button are disappearing from the world"
- blfr 4y ago
  I got so used to opening in the new tab that I don't even notice this anymore. Infuriatingly, some sites disregard ctrl+click and either still open links in the same tab or both in the same and in the new tab!
  - thinkling 4y ago
    If there's a Firefox plugin to fix that behavior, I'd love to know!
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    It doesn’t help that some web frameworks make it difficult to preserve the open in new tab behaviour
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      What modern (last 10 years) web framework makes it difficult to have links be links?
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        NextJS complains if you don’t use their Link component, which in turn doesn’t allow open in new tab unless you nest a dummy <a> inside it. Because I think the Link uses onclick then if there is an immediate <a> child will set it up.
        leerob 4y ago
        The <Link/> component is used for client-side page navigations in the same application. If you need to open links in a new tab with `target=“_blank”`, you should use the normal <a/> tag.
rstuart4133 4y ago
As an Australian visiting Europe, I noticed a huge difference in the way Australians paint their homes and how it's done in Northern Europe. Australia is indeed mostly pastels, and always has been. I remember thinking the occupants of the first house I saw Brittan must have been schizophrenic. The bright colours and contrasts almost hurt my eyes for a while. But it turns in the UK I was the odd one out as most people used colour in that way. Right now I'm in the Netherlands and it's the same deal - wall sized murals cascading with colour through the house. I'm no expert in why people do things, so I have no good reason to speculate. But I did anyway. I put it down to Australian's being able to spend part of every day outdoors for the entire year. There is no need for artificial brightness inside when you looking into a world illuminated by 1kW of sunshine per m2 every day. But the UK was downright dreary for large chunks of the time. It's not unusual to hear a UK expat in Australia say they left the place because they could not stand the depressing weather. If you accept that's what's going on, then the answer is obvious. It's caused by global warming. The world is becoming more like Australia. :D
- calgoo 4y ago
  On possibility is that color is used to make the darker months more bearable. I live in Spain now, but am from Sweden. Whenever i visit Sweden during Christmas I see a lot of reds and greens in the houses with lots of lights and decorations etc. Meanwhile, in Spain, people do decorate, but its normally less colors, more pastels etc. Barcelona city mostly uses blue lights for street decorations, which makes the streets feel even colder.
  - bobthechef 4y ago
    [dead]
- ztetranz 4y ago
  As a kiwi in the US I had the opposite experience. At least where I live in New Hampshire, everything seems gray and drab compared to New Zealand.
- intothemild 4y ago
dalmo3 4y ago
Maybe these days people spend more time looking at screens, which are super colourful and bright. Neutral colours in the real world bring a little balance, calmness to it?
- Sqwandery 4y ago
  This was my thought as well. The first graph in the article is of the color of objects, not all images. I wonder how it would compare if it were to include screenshots and whatnot.
causi 4y ago
I do miss when I was a kid and cars were bright colors. One trend I've been watching with eager anticipation is the recent rise in two-tone car body colors. They're so much more fun to look at than a single shade.
ksec 4y ago
Colour might be missing in the real world. But it lives on in Media. Think Printing, TVs and Computer. We might have a less colourful in house decoration, but our TVs, Games, Movies has brought out much more colour than ever before. I believe because modern media are too colourful, we subconsciously want a much less colourful real world.
- rtpg 4y ago
  It was a trope a couple years back that every AAA game was varying shades of brown, despite the tech going up everything landed on that look.
  - yaseer 4y ago
    This feels like "a couple years" to me too, but games like Gears Of War which epitomised that brown 360/PS3 palette are now pushing 16 years ago!
  - achenet 4y ago
    https://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=222 https://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=222 brown and bloom :p
  - Narishma 4y ago
    A couple of decades maybe.
    - SSLy 4y ago
      The console generation of Xbox 360 / PS3 only ended a decade ago
      - Narishma 4y ago
        And the grey/brown games were mostly popular at the start of it and during the end of the previous generation.
- CTDOCodebases 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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yrgulation 4y ago
Has anyone read the link to used data? “I should note that the data is sourced from Poland” The title and content are as such misleading.
- blfr 4y ago
  Nah, > I should note that the data is sourced from Poland, but if you’re hoping for the situation to be any better in the U.S., unfortunately it isn’t. Over 23 percent of cars last year in the US were white and another 23 percent were black, while purple languishes, unloved, as the least popular. https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car-paint-colors-have-gotten-more-boring-over-the-years https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    Two countries arent the “world”. 46% is not a majority.
seydor 4y ago
> have now modernized to becoming boring minimalist (and I love minimalism) Minimalism and "Contemporary" architecture have overstayed their welcome. I love looking at architecture videos, but damn all houses are the same nowadays! Same boring pallette, empty walls, large windows etc. no wonder there is no color. Even the architect's narrative is boring. Have all the architects been on vacation for the last 10 years?
- bitlax 4y ago
  You're going to love your new shipping crate home!
  - seydor 4y ago
    they re not that colourful either
- safog 4y ago
  Yeah I think it's a wider design movement - everything's transitioning towards more neutral / no strong colors / accents vibe. Interiors, architecture, logos, fonts, furniture, what not. Dunno if there's a name for this movement beyond "contemporary" design. It's not exactly minimalism I don't think. Eventually there will be a reaction and something new will come up.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Almost all houses are built by the builders for the development, so they're all building the same damn house over and over and over again, and since they don't know who the customer will be, they build the default "acceptable house" as currently looking good in Home magazine. Try to find a new house without an open concept. It don't exist.
  - seydor 4y ago
    In the next iteration, toilets will join the open concept
  - ghaff 4y ago
chrismorgan 4y ago
Discussed a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571
quickthrower2 4y ago
Reminds me of this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/vzf9we/harrys_cafe_de_wheels_woolloomooloo_1980s/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/vzf9we/harrys_cafe_... And the comments “looks like a pack of smarties” and “when cars came in actual colours”
patientplatypus 4y ago
magpi3 4y ago
Does the web have something to do with it? Everything is photographed and put online these days, and I wonder how that affected how people think about color both on and offline.
macintux 4y ago
I purchased a pink (well, metallic fuchsia) Jeep Wrangler this year, and reactions are wildly positive. I get compliments from random strangers at least once a week. I think people appreciate color, they just don't want to buy something that they perceive as harder to sell because of it. (Plus, of course, a couple buying a car may both like bright colors but like different bright colors.) Update: I should link to a piece I wrote about the Jeep and reactions to it, inspired by a Bob's Burgers episode. https://opposite-lock.com/topic/52688/tuscadero https://opposite-lock.com/topic/52688/tuscadero
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Last week I was stopped next to a bunch of ladies in a black and pink Wrangler with cancer ribbons on it. First time I’ve ever felt the need to comment on a car. It was meaningful and very tastefully done. They were delighted for the compliment so I must have managed not to sound creepy.
  - macintux 4y ago
    Wranglers seem to be a popular form of self-expression, I suppose because they're very customizable and obviously include a lot of flat surfaces (and still mostly steel, so magnets work).
    - ironmagma 4y ago
      To me it seems more of a cult that popped up around people who don’t care much for the wellbeing of others, road manners, or their gas mileage.
- gspencley 4y ago
  While there are almost surely economic forces that incentivize colour choices, as others have pointed out, and the article points to a gradual trend over time ... I think fashion trends tend to swing in both directions as well. I remember the 80s being colourful and vibrant. Big hair, bold colours. Especially in women's fashion. Then the 90s pulled back from that quite a bit. Hair styles got flatter and straighter, colours toned down. In the 00's I remember 80s fashion starting to come back a lot. The last 10 years have been felt grey and "flat" again.
gausswho 4y ago
I may prefer muted colors because saturated ones I associate with advertising and thereby nuisance, noise and dishonesty.
dghughes 4y ago
White colour vehicles are often the standard colour and do not cost anything if you add a colour you may pay $100 to $500 for it. Seeing so many white vehicles may be just due to people with money issues.
- pier25 4y ago
  And if you live in a hot place a dark car is a bad idea.
  - arminiusreturns 4y ago
    Yep, I was living in a hot desert when I bought my current vehicle. Finding a few papers on heat reflectivity based on color quickly solidified my choice of boring white as correct. Silver was a close second in the list, everything else excluding glitter additives was horrible. Side note, if you think of engines as cpus, youll understand my fascination with high quality radiator/radiator fan improvements over stock.
  - dghughes 4y ago
    If you live in a cool winter climate white colour is bad the metal doesn't get warm enough to drive off moisture. Rust forms more readily compared to a dark car. I spoke to a local mechanic who said never buy white or light colour car (for this region) he spoke with decades of experience.
    - vultour 4y ago
      Now we need to figure out the right color for a place that gets both hot and cold.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  When buying a car I found that white/black/charcoal were the standard options and all the fun colours were only available in the sport and premium packages, so the cost difference was much more than a few hundred dollars. Of course you could have it painted after purchase but most people won't bother to.
BLanen 4y ago
Commodification incentivizes regression to some mean. (rental) houses are losing color because they have to design it in the least offensive way. Better be "acceptable" for 1000 people than "beautiful" for 10. That mcDonalds is also a prime example. That building can be used for anything now. The old McDonald's building is specifically a McDonald's or some sort of "fun" eating establishment. If the McDonald's leaves the building, the "boring" one will be worth more/ can extract more rent.
- Steltek 4y ago
  Nope. Resale value is way too forward thinking for a corporation these days, it's all about short term profit. McD's has been chasing modern fashion and trying to distance themselves from your childhood's nascent obesity crisis, with salads on the menu and apple slices instead of fries in happy meals. Hence you get this "McCafe" look so they can camouflage themselves next to the Starbucks next door. That said, the article is good at highlighting a huge cultural trend. Resale value might be only partially a driver of it. A lot of my monochromatic purchases will never be resold to anyone.
  - dmd 4y ago
    Salads are gone. https://fortune.com/2022/06/09/mcdonalds-is-scrapping-parfaits-and-salads-because-of-the-labor-shortage/ https://fortune.com/2022/06/09/mcdonalds-is-scrapping-parfai...
    - _abox 4y ago
      Here in Spain they've never gone. The breakfast menu has been cancelled here though since Corona and never returned :'( I miss my sausage and egg muffin.
      - rhino369 4y ago
        Gone entirely or just no longer served all day? In America, Covid killed the "all day breakfast," which is a shame. Sausage and egg muffin is better than all their lunch/dinner food.
hownottowrite 4y ago
I do abstract paintings for fun. To be honest, they’re not that good but they are fun. Anyway, what I’ve notice though is that people tend to respond strongest to the brightest colors often with an exuberance that feels a bit like they are missing something in their lives.
tambourine_man 4y ago
This site highjacks the browser's back button.
pibechorro 4y ago
I personally appreciate the loss of color. Color is amazing when its in harmony, like we see in nature. 99% of what people and corps wear/make clashes and is garish. Its the same as sugar in all our food, you loose subtlety.
dgudkov 4y ago
I don't think it's universal. Europe is more colorful than US/Canada. I think that's because esthetic education is better in Europe.
IneffablePigeon 4y ago
I found the source article much more illuminating: https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer-vision-to-explore-the-science-museum-c4b4f1cbd72c https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... I don't find the headline graph that convincing. Firstly, it's only based on items in this museum's collection, which is quite a biased set as it says in the article. Secondly - if you actually look at the colour chart closely, you can see that although there is a trend of more grayscale objects in the collection, within the coloured section there's also a trend away from almost everything being some shade of yellow, orange or brown towards a much broader range of hues. Blues, greens and purples seem much better represented. It looks to me like ~70% of the colours were basically "brown" in the 1800s, and now ~40% are white/gray/black. Seems more a reflection of modern objects being made more out of metal and plastic and less out of wood than anything else. Again, this is putting aside the clear bias in the samples here. I'm sure there are trends going on (and the car colour one seems legit to me) but I think this overblows it a little. Fashion ebbs and flows.
- dr_orpheus 4y ago
  I think there is also another bias in the samples they have in that a lot of the older items have developed some sort of patina/rust/aging. That tends to skew them in to the brown, dark grey and generally muted colors. If you watch the video there are a number of items that are old gears, chains and machinery.
- antioppressor 4y ago
  Open your eyes...
  - dang 4y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we eventually have to ban such accounts, because it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
yusege 4y ago
It was mostly copper and gold colors in the beginning of the graphic. Then they found same ways to apply colors to objects. And we can't say anything now about if Color has been disappearing from world. The data and graphic is not complete. It could be demand and demand can change with time. People may be bored from black and grey in future and all the object colors would change.
mikkelam 4y ago
Eh, fashion is usually very cyclical. At some point, people will get tired of this and things will trend the other way. Same way as 90s-00s clothing is very popular these days.
- angryGhost 4y ago
  explains why I see white tank tops everywhere
zitterbewegung 4y ago
If you have a machine learning model that attempts to judge that color is disappearing from the world using pictures did they take into account that people now use cameras that change the color space of a photo to be more bland?
bombcar 4y ago
Once place color has been exploding is the power-tool market. Years ago almost every corded drill you could find was black or gray or maybe a dark red. Now each brand has their own color (offhand Dewalt Yellow, Milwaukee or Craftsman Red, Ryobi Nuclear Waste Green, etc). They're very bright and there's an argument it makes them easier to see on the job site, but it's also an important part of their branding, too, so much so that contractors will say things like "I hope yellow catches up with red, I really want a tool like that."
- macintux 4y ago
  I assumed it was to make it easier to identify the right battery packs.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Sadly almost all the battery packs are basically black with some accent colors (since they all now have rubberized protection).
- tatersolid 4y ago
  DeWalt tools have been bright yellow my entire life. I also remember Jimmy Carter being president, so they’ve been yellow for quite a while.
xwdv 4y ago
The real reason we’re seeing less color is because we’ve finally reached an enlightened state of taste where we begin to appreciate the unpretentious beauty of true neutrals. By taking away color, we can instead appreciate the beauty of pure shapes and natural lines or textures. Sometimes color can be so overpowering that all you see is a color, and the underlying object becomes harder to appreciate. I think the new McDonalds looks far better than the gawdy colorful looking one of the past. But I guess if you were a child with poor sense of style you may prefer the latter.
kradeelav 4y ago
Putting aside micro-design trends that come and go per decade given this has been happening for longer than just for one or two, my bet's on: a) corporations skewing towards multi-use capabilities (your camera is not just your camera, it's a phone, mobile computer, app machine, and camera all at once) and b) corporations trying to capture the maximum amount of dollars (said more uncharitably: cater to the lowest common denominator). There's a lot of sister comments here that mention that colors evoke strong responses - it can be good, but bean counters are going to cringe at every lost sale and agitate for neutrals. Personally I wish the transparent devices of the 90's would come back. seeing the internals was magical. :)
mrwh 4y ago
Dark grey houses, why? I've seen so many recently renovated and for sale houses painted the drabest colours and I really don't understand it at all. It's like a symbol for being tasteful, without actually having any taste.
Tao3300 4y ago
What if... color isn't disappearing, but grays are increasing? What if we've discovered beauty and excitement in black, white, and the shades in-between? Though I have happily owned purple, blue, red, and green cars in this century.
swayvil 4y ago
House remodeler here. Gray everything. That's what's popular. Light gray walls, medium gray trim, dark gray floor. We used to joke that it's a sure sign that the residents are cocaine/alcohol enthusiasts (because, yes, those people do indeed love gray). But now it's everywhere. Makes you think.
ur-whale 4y ago
> Color has been disappearing from the world ... and? Is that a bad thing for some reason?
nix0n 4y ago
Reminds me of Calvin's Dad's assertion that black-and-white photos are actually color photos of a black-and-white world: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09/ https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09/
- glonq 4y ago
  As a C&H fan, I definitely did convince my young daughter that the world used to be monochrome.
guywithahat 4y ago
The car color one can be explained; people used to order cars much more often than they do now, so you'd order exactly what you want including wacky colors. Now you're probably just going to buy what they have, which means they have to have non-offensive colors. Whether this is what happened to everything else is hard to say, but that's at least the short answer for vehicles
CTDOCodebases 4y ago
My personal theory is colour is stimulating and we are getting a lot of that stimulation by looking at screens all day. Living in a dull space counter acts that.
JasonFruit 4y ago
What does the hashtag "#tweet source removed as fascist tendencies have been pointed out" mean? I'm assuming they decided not to provide a source for information on this post because... they don't like the source? I hope I'm misunderstanding; if you're using a sketchy source, it's probably more important to note that, and you're still obligated to cite people you don't approve of.
mooreed 4y ago
I love the scientific discussion here, but much of this seems to miss the idea of “millennial minimalism”. The preference tends towards plain/simple buildings so that nature can have the main stage. Have no fear Gen Z is a pendulum towards radical 90s colors.
animal_spirits 4y ago
Color and style trends go hand in hand and in my opinion I think the loss of color is good for a more sustainable future. As style trends change people are more likely to trash old stuff for new stuff, and if the stuff is not strongly tied to any style-trend then it's likely people will not throw it away.
polynomial 4y ago
Related question of why TVs/displays basically only come in basic black. In some of the rooms in our home the TV is literally the only black thing in the entire room.
jjslocum3 4y ago
We get all our color from our screens now.
joshstrange 4y ago
For myself I've always bought the black (or whatever they call it this week) iPhone because I just assumed it would be the easiest to get and would have the highest/easiest resale. The resale is less of an issue as I'm just perpetually on the upgrade program now but I've always worried that getting a more exotic color could potentially push back my ship date. Maybe this year I'll try getting a color other than black. I just don't care much because I always put a (black) case on my phone so I don't imagine a colored iPhone would even be noticeable. As for cars and other places where I could pick color I often go with gray/black because it's more versatile, less "offensive", and doesn't require me to "commit" to a color. I'm fine with bland colors overall whereas I can't be sure that I'll like that blue/red/etc color in 1 week, month, year. Bland just feels like the safe choice, even if that's a silly reason.
- jedberg 4y ago
  My wife just got a new iPhone, and she picked the blue (we've both had black for a while now) and then she picked up a clear case specially so you could see the phone color underneath. She said, "If I'm gonna get the fancy color there is no point in covering it up with solid color case".
racl101 4y ago
A microcosm for me is not wanting to stand out in any way with the colors that I use to dress. More and more I fear people I encounter in train stations and down town. People are just nuttier and more radical. I don't know if it's the politics, COVID or increased drug usage. Anyway, I dress in drab colors and try not to stand out. I avoid strong reds, yellows, greens, blues, or anything that could make me stand out like national flag colors or rainbow representations. Don't wanna accidentally call attention on myself by showing any kind of allegiance to anything. Ironically, now I can afford clothes that I couldn't afford before but I no longer feel like I can spend money on things that are frivolous nor flashy for the reasons stated.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  npc
angst_ridden 4y ago
Our house has been a dark blue with white trim for over a decade. We built an expansion in our back yard, and painted it a fairly saturated purple. It's not visible from the street (except one very narrow angle). However, we received hate mail from neighbors who complained that the view from their 2nd story window into our back yard was spoiled, and that we should respect that we lived in society not in some hippy commune. Other neighbors regularly bring their visitors to stand at the one tiny piece of the sidewalk where they can look down our driveway to see the purple, and point and shake their heads and grouse about it. It's really kind of amazing how much hostility the color has generated. We used to be invited to neighborhood gatherings and cocktail parties and such. Now, because we callously refuse to repaint the extension and main house some sedate dull color, people literally won't speak to us. This isn't an HOA neighborhood; it's an artsy-boho community known for creative types and public murals. TL;DR people suck, colors are cool.
throw03172019 4y ago
Does this blog really need to trap the back button? Use history replace instead of push, please.
- stalkerman 4y ago
  Yep this is pretty poor. Took me several attempts to go back before I realised what was happening :(
powersnail 4y ago
Anecdotally, I look out from my window, and in the parking lot, there are 7 black, 6 white, 6 gray (of different shades), 3 red, 2 dark blue, 1 grayish blue, and 1 Windows-XP-blue cars. 7 out of 26 are colorful. I personally like bright color for little objects (pens, ties, socks, etc.), but black and white for the big things (like cars). The small stuff feels like silent, introverted rebellion. But pink cars and bright green houses? It's just too conspicuously salient. There's nowhere to hide. It invites too much attention, and grips so many eyeballs, that it makes me feel naked in a crowd.
- tfandango 4y ago
  I know some cars cost more to get a different color, like Teslas. They come in white, but if you want something like red, that's an extra $1000. I recently wanted to buy a car and [anecdotally also] the dealerships have like 90% black and white cars, and maybe there a couple of grey cars!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dwheeler 4y ago
I think it's just a current fashion. There's no point in complaining that fashions change; it's better to accept that they do. The skirt hems go up in some years; in other years they go down. Bell bottoms are in, then they are out. And so on. Fashions will keep changing, and it's OK :-).
VLM 4y ago
Should be linked to this previous HN story "Tracking Everything I Wore For 1 Year" from 52 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957210 I noticed in that previous story that the author spent almost the entire year wearing dark monochromatic gray clothes and very very dark shades of blue. One theory I would propose is followers follow, and if everything around a person from house colors to car colors to, well, everything, is bland and colorless, then they will follow, and drive even more people into blandness, until essentially everything is merely a shade of gray.
ladyattis 4y ago
It's kind of funny realizing how much I try to add color and patterns to my clothing and house décor probably due to being someone who suffers from depression. Basically, more color and visual variety seems to mitigate some of the worse effects of depression for me especially in winter.
raydev 4y ago
On the subject of cars, the effect is far more pronounced in Canada vs the southern US. Every time I go down south I'm struck by the sheer variety of year models and colors. When I return to Canada and spend a few hours on the 401 or visit the Maritimes, most cars are white/silver/gray/black and they're all made in the last 10 years. The age thing I understand (salt damage), but the lack of color doesn't make any sense.
gartdavis 4y ago
One way to think about this is that color is information. We have a processing capacity for this information that became fully saturated somewhere between 1967 and 1973, and since then we've been creating a surplus that everyone has to filter out as noise. In that context, it makes sense to me that consumers (and marketers, and product designers) now choose simplicity over the radiant chaos of Jackson Pollock, Peter Max, or Ronald McDonald.
worik 4y ago
I like it!
nloa 4y ago
rogierhofboer 4y ago
Immediately thought about the movie "Corpse Bride" from Tim Burton, where the world of the living is grey and the world of the dead is very colourful. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0121164/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0121164/
NIL8 4y ago
Something I don't see mentioned is how over the last century manufacturers chose to use colors that would disguise the staining and discolouration caused by tobacco smoke. This is especially true of products designed for office use. The Commodore 64 is a good example.

wilg 4y ago

Fashion changes, but this is probably mostly confirmation bias. Don't worry about it, this is made-up and just encourages you to be nostalgic and fearful.

yababa_y 4y ago
so the dataset is completely bogus or what is your explanation for how this is made-up?
- hasperdi 4y ago
  The dataset may not be bogus, but a lot of this fashion / what people like / what people think is good
jefftk 4y ago
How would this be confirmation bias?

t-3 4y ago

Black, white, and grey are also colors. The reason for their popularity is likely due to the modern aesthetics of simplicity and elegance. Bright colors give a "busy" appearance, they are gaudy and attention-grabbing. Emotionless, professional, and modest "inorganic" tones give the impression of maturity and sophistication.

hulitu 4y ago
And the dark is light /s
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
And Goths :)
OGforces 4y ago

beardyw 4y ago

It's just fashion. People try to rationalise it because they don't like to think they are influenced by fashion. Those who really aren't are just perceived as weird.

funnym0nk3y 4y ago

For cars I assume one factor is resell value. "Neutral" colours seem to appeal to more people and thus selling a bright yellow car will either take you longer or won't get your as good of a price.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Funny. It's "I love bright colors but the next owner might not." Are we in fact collectively nerfing our color preferences based on a false assumption? I have been buying bright red and yellow cars for over a decade now (no problem reselling them, FWIW). The problem is that it is so hard to even find cars for sale from the manufacturer in bright colors. I think our tastes are being directed by marketing and bean counters making "safe bets". I feel like we've been driving office beiege for a few decades now.
- d3ckard 4y ago
  I would always choose bright color, as I find it safer (more visible across weather conditions). It’s just hard to get them if you want a lease (and I don’t want to own a car - ever).

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ekianjo 4y ago

I blame Apple.

omega3 4y ago
Which is ironic considering what they were doing in the 90s with the iMac G3.
- djmips 4y ago
  and their logo used to be a rainbow apple.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    I feel like Cook & Co. have been bringing back the rainbow apple, no?
Gigachad 4y ago
Apple is far exceeding every other competitor at providing color options.

randcraw 4y ago

Bright color is seen as upbeat, happy, optimistic. But we aren't.

slowmovintarget 4y ago
I've been scrolling looking for this. This, I think, is the actual correct take. Not resale value, or mass appeal which is a symptom. There have long been studies on the connection between societal optimism and color choice. The fashion industry and car industry in particular are trailing indicators for public sentiment on the state of the world. https://www.pcimag.com/blogs/14-pci-blog/post/104991-how-color-choices-echo-the-economic-climate-and-why-it-matters https://www.pcimag.com/blogs/14-pci-blog/post/104991-how-col...

unity1001 4y ago

OOD 4y ago
[dead]

Teelemii 4y ago

My flat is colorful my car is black. Any other car color would have cost extra which I was not willing to pay. 60-80 were weirdly colorful too bright for no particular reason. I don't think there is much to interpret into this.

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h2odragon 4y ago

Bright colors are an effort to stand out from the crowd. That no longer a laudable goal; now we admire the safe middle of the herd. Don't be unique, don't be unusual, don't be noticed.

nicbou 4y ago
I think it's fine not to express ourselves through consumption. That aside, neutral colours are just more practical. They're easier to match, easier to clean, and suit more occasions. It's more economical all around.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  And the purpose of life is, of course, economic efficiency. /s
Rebelgecko 4y ago
As per the Normcore Manifesto [1], refusing to try rebel when society encourages you to really is the greatest form of rebellion. "If the rule is Think Different, being seen as normal is the scariest thing... Which paradoxically makes normalcy ripe for the überelites to adopt as their own, confirming their status by showing how disposable the trappings of uniqueness are. The most different thing to do is to reject being different all together. When the fringes get more and more crowded, Mass Indie turns toward the middle. Having mastered difference, the truly cool attempt to master sameness." [1]: http://khole.net/issues/youth-mode/ http://khole.net/issues/youth-mode/
- asutekku 4y ago
  I like normcore as a trend but this is just someone trying to justify the trend and trying to make it more meaningful than what it actually is.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  This reads like vanilla trying to convince the world that it's really the edgy one.

Tanoc 4y ago

There's a couple of reasons why. None of them are particularly pleasing. For one, it costs more money to dye the plastic or paint/anodize the metal. Everyone except children are going to buy the product based on function or need and companies have determined that the colour has no outsized effect on which one they choose. So it's cheaper to use basic black plastic and unpainted metal. The other is that for things like cars and furniture there's a resale factor. A car is a big investment, and you want as much money as possible to put towards the purchase of the next one. A bright colour like yellow might make you happy while you own it, but it will be difficult to sell to other people as it's a very loud and ostentatious colour. It's the same with furniture and home architecture. '70s patterns in carpet will reduce the resale value of a house because few people will be willing to adapt their furniture to match. For corporate environments it's about ease of repurposing the space and to be the least bit disruptive to where they're doing business. It'd cost a lot of money to remodel all the old red steel roof McDonald's if that lot were ever sold. In fact there are plenty of gable roof Pizza Huts that just got repainted after they were sold because remodeling the building cost too much money. McDonald's trend towards grey earth tones using metal and stone is so they can fit into big cities these days, especially in Europe and Asia. The coffeehouse aesthetic that Starbucks pioneered has proven especially attractive in those markets, and other companies are following suit by trying to use that same look to blend into modern five over ones and block highrises.

stinos 4y ago
The other is that for things like cars and furniture there's a resale factor. That's shifting the 'why' question to: why do people care more about resale value now than they did 20 years ago. I'd guess the reason would be the state of the economy? However a search for 'car color linked to economy' reveals other theories, like paint used: https://slate.com/culture/2011/10/car-paint-colors-why-are-so-many-cars-painted-white-silver-and-black.html https://slate.com/culture/2011/10/car-paint-colors-why-are-s...
- macintux 4y ago
  I'd posit cars are lasting longer, and thus retaining their value, making resale more worthy of consideration than it might have been decades ago.

deleted 4y ago

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jaredcwhite 4y ago

Ugh, that "modern" all-gray home decor style. I can't stand it. Not saying everything should be purple and gold and rainbows, but for the love of all that is good and decent in this world, please: it's OK to add some splashes of bright color in your home!!

helmholtz 4y ago
Key word being some. If everything is emphasized than nothing is. Growing up in India, I'd day good riddance to shouty colors and permanent visual overstimulation. Grey is calmn. Neutrals are calmn. Fuck colors.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    - rdlw 4y ago
      What is a "data driven opinion"? Do you mean a fact? What data drives your choice of favourite colour?
      - imwillofficial 4y ago
        Data driven opinions are not facts. An opinion may be driven by incomplete or wrong data. I don’t expect people to only believe facts, that’s not fair, and I’m no impartial arbiter anyway. As for what data drives my favorite color, that’s actually a super interesting question. All I know is Orange is the best color, fact.
- gausswho 4y ago
  Tragedy of the chromatic commons. Barren inoffense is maximum profit. Apartments go all white (with any tree that reducing light or view distance chopped down) and then it's on you to liven the place up.

jelliclesfarm 4y ago

i wanted to paint my garden shed red, but my elderly asian neighbour said that it would hurt her eyes. so i painted it purple and yellow. i would die without colour in my life. it is the one thing i miss most from back when i was younger. it is slightly better in california but it was positively depressing when i was living in new england. i think they have colour in their lives only once a year..during fall. the best colours come from nature. flowers, sunsets, birds are disappearing from our lives too. where are our green spaces in cities? why is our food drab and brown? i work with a tomato breeder and the one thing i learnt is that we still eat with our eyes. people pay more for colourful food. being attracted to colour is hardwired in most species. it is a mating and survival cue for most species. if we dont know how to recognise colour and categorise them, we couldnt have evolved to where we are now in our timeline. the wrong mushroom or berry would have killed the entire tribe drying up their gene pool. that we are ok with a lack of colour in our lives indicates that our flight/fight instincts are lax...our lives are safer, predictable, comfortable and less fraught with danger. my nervous system is primed for flight/fight. i feel ill at ease when there is no colour around me and i still perceive that as something to navigate with caution. i am always recording colours or details around me...a little recording whirring machine at the back of my mind is noting down everything in my environment to make me feel safer. it's silence and lack of colour that throws me off. eta: re: the original article... i think sensors and cameras and spectrascopes and all the other wonderful things tech has given us dont need colours. we can measure light and heat in other innumerable ways to harvest required data. a robot's eyes do not need to see like we do...as we automate most functions, colour can become unnecessary. practical example: we used to evaluate ripeness of produce with colour ...now we use a brix refractometer. why try to figure if tomatoes are picked ripe when you can save money and time by picking them unripe and ripen with ethylene gas...easily monitored for over ripening with floor ethylene detectors in large warehouses filled with crates of produce from floor to ceiling. we dont need colour because technology knows how to utilise all the data in the entire spectrum. colour is just a sliver of it.

ninefathom 4y ago

The article simply (and, one might argue, rather effectively) shows data; the comments here have been far more interesting. This seems to be a surprisingly polarizing (pun not intended) issue. Why are some people sanguine with the diminishing of color, yet others find it upsetting? Why is it a fashion trend to some, yet a crucial piece of identity to others? I don't know, but I'd love to find out. So here's my addition to the brew: urbanization. What if the trend is not entirely fashion or economy, but also a function of population density? I've spent my fair share of time in both urban and rural areas, and the urban seem to be much more chromatically homogeneous in terms of surface area, punctuated with more vivid splashes. Rural areas tend to lack the sudden bright splashes, but have miles upon miles of subtle variation. Could increasing population densities be contributing to a loss of color?

yvan-eht-nioj 4y ago
I remember being in Tokyo station at rush hour and seeing a sea of beige/pastels and white shirts, with the odd pop of bright colour (usually another tourist) - exactly as you mentioned, but in the form of a microcosm. I also remember noting that the effect of the homogeneity as being calming, generating serenity amidst what would otherwise be chaotic. Perhaps the trend towards homogenous colours are communal hive-mind response to 21st Century overstimulation, noise pollution and ever increasing urban density - a desperate grasp for less stimulation in a world of endless beeping, flashing and ringing.
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  I don't not buy this, but seems kinda far fetched. but then again this explains why the trend is apparently increasing in speed. (but i feel like there's more photos from the later we go that there has to be some kind of normalisation for this date to actually make sense...)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago

drannex 4y ago

That's my article, very interesting to see posted here!

imwillofficial 4y ago
Great work, keep tha noggin workin!
- imwillofficial 4y ago
sjostrom7 4y ago
The car color graph is very effective, nice work.
- well_actulily 4y ago
  (Sauce) https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/j7yfqb/oc_car_color_distribution_broken_down_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/j7yfqb/oc_...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I wonder if something can be deduced about people's opinion of the world/economy based on the colors (or at least the manufacturer's).
wincy 4y ago
I’m getting serious deja vu here, wasn’t this article posted a week or two ago? Edit: found it, this article was similar https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32468950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32468950
- soundnote 4y ago
  Here's the Twitter original: https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976051860963333 https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976051860963333 Previous HN threads about the Twitter thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571 (215 comments, 27 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246181 (5 comments, 28 days ago)

janef0421 4y ago

Personally, I like the more muted colour palettes of modern design. It makes things less busy and highlights what colour does exist.

aaron695 4y ago

lbriner 4y ago

I wonder how much in houses is related to how frequently we re-furnish our houses compared to 50 years back. I know old people who have the same wallpaper and furniture that they had when they got married, "if it aint broke, don't fix it", the younger generation is now much more likely to. I have had 3 different sets of sofas/chairs in the last, perhaps, 7 years. Neutral colours means I can change the fittings to whatever I feel like. What I don't want to do is repaint everything to match.

derbOac 4y ago
I do think this is part of it. When I got married my spouse wanted a set of really bright-colored dishes. I liked them too, but was worried we'd get tired of them and want something else, and preferred neutral colors for that reason. Neutral colors aren't as appealing to me at some level but I'm also less likely to tire of them, and as you say, I think they're more compatible with other changes. I've wrestled with this in some recent remodeling too, thinking a blue would be nice here, but decided against it because I didn't want to change my mind later. But I was remodeling, so maybe it's inevitable anyway. I think so much is disposable in our lives that maybe we gravitate toward colors that seem less ephemeral.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I find with things like "plates" that the normal china/white/off-gray colors are fine. But with things like mixing bowls, measuring cups, etc, having bright colors is incredibly helpful if someone is in the kitchen with you - "give me the red cup" is easier to understand than "give me the 1-1/4 cup, no that other one over there".
- jacooper 4y ago
  I personally bought a white phone once, it was the S10+, i did it because it was the flashy color and it was on every AD, also the Black sucked on that phone, there was no midnight black. After a couple of months, I regreted it, and my next phone was naturally black.
- munificent 4y ago

foobarbecue 4y ago

https://youtu.be/Dhwcc-iiNJQ https://youtu.be/Dhwcc-iiNJQ

Theodores 4y ago

For shades of grey you just need titanium dioxide. It is white and not something people worry about if it is in food. For reasons I don't understand, many colours need fairly toxic chemicals. Just think of the names. Cadmium Yellow, Cobalt Blue - would you like a bit of strontium nitrate with that? Because we eat food and have children, we can't have all the colours that we used to have. We can't even have lead in paint these days. This is just one factor, and it supports my general belief that progress in fashion/art/design is technology driven. Regarding bland houses, what do you expect when the only people buying homes are doing so in order to rent seek/flip the property? Particularly when IKEA is just a short drive out of town. Cars is the same deal, paint technology has changed to be less toxic and people buying cars aren't buying them with their own money to own forever. They got to get that resale at the end.

projektfu 4y ago
Colors are often toxic because they need to have the ability to absorb many wavelengths and reflect or re-emit particular bands. Transition metals have lots of ability for electrons to move between oxidation states, allowing this absorbtion and re-emission, but many form toxic compounds. Similarly, aromatic compounds, especially those containing nitrogen, have this ability. Unfortunately many are toxic, and many of the less toxic ones fade in the light. That said, toxicity is relative to dose and dose depends on whether these things are free in the environment. A lot of things like cadmium dyes can be effectively trapped and are less toxic than other commonly used chemicals. Long-term, however, such as in a landfill, the story is not as simple. Notably, lead oxide paint was used because it was bright white. Titanium dioxide is not as good but obviously much safer.
- Theodores 4y ago
  Do you mind if I ask you how you know this stuff and where I can get started? I really do want to know more about the chemicals in colours and why, with the history in there too. We get told what the colour wheel is and never what is in the paints when we are at school. I think we would value the materials more if we had any idea of how we got here.

slowmotiony 4y ago

"Sites which allow you to use the back button are disappearing from the world"

blfr 4y ago
I got so used to opening in the new tab that I don't even notice this anymore. Infuriatingly, some sites disregard ctrl+click and either still open links in the same tab or both in the same and in the new tab!
- thinkling 4y ago
  If there's a Firefox plugin to fix that behavior, I'd love to know!
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  It doesn’t help that some web frameworks make it difficult to preserve the open in new tab behaviour
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    What modern (last 10 years) web framework makes it difficult to have links be links?
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      NextJS complains if you don’t use their Link component, which in turn doesn’t allow open in new tab unless you nest a dummy <a> inside it. Because I think the Link uses onclick then if there is an immediate <a> child will set it up.
      - leerob 4y ago
        The <Link/> component is used for client-side page navigations in the same application. If you need to open links in a new tab with `target=“_blank”`, you should use the normal <a/> tag.

rstuart4133 4y ago

As an Australian visiting Europe, I noticed a huge difference in the way Australians paint their homes and how it's done in Northern Europe. Australia is indeed mostly pastels, and always has been. I remember thinking the occupants of the first house I saw Brittan must have been schizophrenic. The bright colours and contrasts almost hurt my eyes for a while. But it turns in the UK I was the odd one out as most people used colour in that way. Right now I'm in the Netherlands and it's the same deal - wall sized murals cascading with colour through the house. I'm no expert in why people do things, so I have no good reason to speculate. But I did anyway. I put it down to Australian's being able to spend part of every day outdoors for the entire year. There is no need for artificial brightness inside when you looking into a world illuminated by 1kW of sunshine per m2 every day. But the UK was downright dreary for large chunks of the time. It's not unusual to hear a UK expat in Australia say they left the place because they could not stand the depressing weather. If you accept that's what's going on, then the answer is obvious. It's caused by global warming. The world is becoming more like Australia. :D

calgoo 4y ago
On possibility is that color is used to make the darker months more bearable. I live in Spain now, but am from Sweden. Whenever i visit Sweden during Christmas I see a lot of reds and greens in the houses with lots of lights and decorations etc. Meanwhile, in Spain, people do decorate, but its normally less colors, more pastels etc. Barcelona city mostly uses blue lights for street decorations, which makes the streets feel even colder.
- bobthechef 4y ago
  [dead]
ztetranz 4y ago
As a kiwi in the US I had the opposite experience. At least where I live in New Hampshire, everything seems gray and drab compared to New Zealand.
intothemild 4y ago

dalmo3 4y ago

Maybe these days people spend more time looking at screens, which are super colourful and bright. Neutral colours in the real world bring a little balance, calmness to it?

Sqwandery 4y ago
This was my thought as well. The first graph in the article is of the color of objects, not all images. I wonder how it would compare if it were to include screenshots and whatnot.

causi 4y ago

I do miss when I was a kid and cars were bright colors. One trend I've been watching with eager anticipation is the recent rise in two-tone car body colors. They're so much more fun to look at than a single shade.

ksec 4y ago

Colour might be missing in the real world. But it lives on in Media. Think Printing, TVs and Computer. We might have a less colourful in house decoration, but our TVs, Games, Movies has brought out much more colour than ever before. I believe because modern media are too colourful, we subconsciously want a much less colourful real world.

rtpg 4y ago
It was a trope a couple years back that every AAA game was varying shades of brown, despite the tech going up everything landed on that look.
- yaseer 4y ago
  This feels like "a couple years" to me too, but games like Gears Of War which epitomised that brown 360/PS3 palette are now pushing 16 years ago!
- achenet 4y ago
  https://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=222 https://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=222 brown and bloom :p
- Narishma 4y ago
  A couple of decades maybe.
  - SSLy 4y ago
    The console generation of Xbox 360 / PS3 only ended a decade ago
    - Narishma 4y ago
      And the grey/brown games were mostly popular at the start of it and during the end of the previous generation.
CTDOCodebases 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yrgulation 4y ago

Has anyone read the link to used data? “I should note that the data is sourced from Poland” The title and content are as such misleading.

blfr 4y ago
Nah, > I should note that the data is sourced from Poland, but if you’re hoping for the situation to be any better in the U.S., unfortunately it isn’t. Over 23 percent of cars last year in the US were white and another 23 percent were black, while purple languishes, unloved, as the least popular. https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car-paint-colors-have-gotten-more-boring-over-the-years https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...
- yrgulation 4y ago
  Two countries arent the “world”. 46% is not a majority.

seydor 4y ago

> have now modernized to becoming boring minimalist (and I love minimalism) Minimalism and "Contemporary" architecture have overstayed their welcome. I love looking at architecture videos, but damn all houses are the same nowadays! Same boring pallette, empty walls, large windows etc. no wonder there is no color. Even the architect's narrative is boring. Have all the architects been on vacation for the last 10 years?

bitlax 4y ago
You're going to love your new shipping crate home!
- seydor 4y ago
  they re not that colourful either
safog 4y ago
Yeah I think it's a wider design movement - everything's transitioning towards more neutral / no strong colors / accents vibe. Interiors, architecture, logos, fonts, furniture, what not. Dunno if there's a name for this movement beyond "contemporary" design. It's not exactly minimalism I don't think. Eventually there will be a reaction and something new will come up.
bombcar 4y ago
Almost all houses are built by the builders for the development, so they're all building the same damn house over and over and over again, and since they don't know who the customer will be, they build the default "acceptable house" as currently looking good in Home magazine. Try to find a new house without an open concept. It don't exist.
- seydor 4y ago
  In the next iteration, toilets will join the open concept
- ghaff 4y ago

chrismorgan 4y ago

Discussed a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571

quickthrower2 4y ago

Reminds me of this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/vzf9we/harrys_cafe_de_wheels_woolloomooloo_1980s/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/vzf9we/harrys_cafe_... And the comments “looks like a pack of smarties” and “when cars came in actual colours”

patientplatypus 4y ago

magpi3 4y ago

Does the web have something to do with it? Everything is photographed and put online these days, and I wonder how that affected how people think about color both on and offline.

macintux 4y ago

I purchased a pink (well, metallic fuchsia) Jeep Wrangler this year, and reactions are wildly positive. I get compliments from random strangers at least once a week. I think people appreciate color, they just don't want to buy something that they perceive as harder to sell because of it. (Plus, of course, a couple buying a car may both like bright colors but like different bright colors.) Update: I should link to a piece I wrote about the Jeep and reactions to it, inspired by a Bob's Burgers episode. https://opposite-lock.com/topic/52688/tuscadero https://opposite-lock.com/topic/52688/tuscadero

Waterluvian 4y ago
Last week I was stopped next to a bunch of ladies in a black and pink Wrangler with cancer ribbons on it. First time I’ve ever felt the need to comment on a car. It was meaningful and very tastefully done. They were delighted for the compliment so I must have managed not to sound creepy.
- macintux 4y ago
  Wranglers seem to be a popular form of self-expression, I suppose because they're very customizable and obviously include a lot of flat surfaces (and still mostly steel, so magnets work).
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    To me it seems more of a cult that popped up around people who don’t care much for the wellbeing of others, road manners, or their gas mileage.
gspencley 4y ago
While there are almost surely economic forces that incentivize colour choices, as others have pointed out, and the article points to a gradual trend over time ... I think fashion trends tend to swing in both directions as well. I remember the 80s being colourful and vibrant. Big hair, bold colours. Especially in women's fashion. Then the 90s pulled back from that quite a bit. Hair styles got flatter and straighter, colours toned down. In the 00's I remember 80s fashion starting to come back a lot. The last 10 years have been felt grey and "flat" again.

gausswho 4y ago

I may prefer muted colors because saturated ones I associate with advertising and thereby nuisance, noise and dishonesty.

dghughes 4y ago

White colour vehicles are often the standard colour and do not cost anything if you add a colour you may pay $100 to $500 for it. Seeing so many white vehicles may be just due to people with money issues.

pier25 4y ago
And if you live in a hot place a dark car is a bad idea.
- arminiusreturns 4y ago
  Yep, I was living in a hot desert when I bought my current vehicle. Finding a few papers on heat reflectivity based on color quickly solidified my choice of boring white as correct. Silver was a close second in the list, everything else excluding glitter additives was horrible. Side note, if you think of engines as cpus, youll understand my fascination with high quality radiator/radiator fan improvements over stock.
- dghughes 4y ago
  If you live in a cool winter climate white colour is bad the metal doesn't get warm enough to drive off moisture. Rust forms more readily compared to a dark car. I spoke to a local mechanic who said never buy white or light colour car (for this region) he spoke with decades of experience.
  - vultour 4y ago
    Now we need to figure out the right color for a place that gets both hot and cold.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
When buying a car I found that white/black/charcoal were the standard options and all the fun colours were only available in the sport and premium packages, so the cost difference was much more than a few hundred dollars. Of course you could have it painted after purchase but most people won't bother to.

BLanen 4y ago

Commodification incentivizes regression to some mean. (rental) houses are losing color because they have to design it in the least offensive way. Better be "acceptable" for 1000 people than "beautiful" for 10. That mcDonalds is also a prime example. That building can be used for anything now. The old McDonald's building is specifically a McDonald's or some sort of "fun" eating establishment. If the McDonald's leaves the building, the "boring" one will be worth more/ can extract more rent.

Steltek 4y ago
Nope. Resale value is way too forward thinking for a corporation these days, it's all about short term profit. McD's has been chasing modern fashion and trying to distance themselves from your childhood's nascent obesity crisis, with salads on the menu and apple slices instead of fries in happy meals. Hence you get this "McCafe" look so they can camouflage themselves next to the Starbucks next door. That said, the article is good at highlighting a huge cultural trend. Resale value might be only partially a driver of it. A lot of my monochromatic purchases will never be resold to anyone.
- dmd 4y ago
  Salads are gone. https://fortune.com/2022/06/09/mcdonalds-is-scrapping-parfaits-and-salads-because-of-the-labor-shortage/ https://fortune.com/2022/06/09/mcdonalds-is-scrapping-parfai...
  - _abox 4y ago
    Here in Spain they've never gone. The breakfast menu has been cancelled here though since Corona and never returned :'( I miss my sausage and egg muffin.
    - rhino369 4y ago
      Gone entirely or just no longer served all day? In America, Covid killed the "all day breakfast," which is a shame. Sausage and egg muffin is better than all their lunch/dinner food.

hownottowrite 4y ago

I do abstract paintings for fun. To be honest, they’re not that good but they are fun. Anyway, what I’ve notice though is that people tend to respond strongest to the brightest colors often with an exuberance that feels a bit like they are missing something in their lives.

tambourine_man 4y ago

This site highjacks the browser's back button.

pibechorro 4y ago

I personally appreciate the loss of color. Color is amazing when its in harmony, like we see in nature. 99% of what people and corps wear/make clashes and is garish. Its the same as sugar in all our food, you loose subtlety.

dgudkov 4y ago

I don't think it's universal. Europe is more colorful than US/Canada. I think that's because esthetic education is better in Europe.

IneffablePigeon 4y ago

I found the source article much more illuminating: https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer-vision-to-explore-the-science-museum-c4b4f1cbd72c https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... I don't find the headline graph that convincing. Firstly, it's only based on items in this museum's collection, which is quite a biased set as it says in the article. Secondly - if you actually look at the colour chart closely, you can see that although there is a trend of more grayscale objects in the collection, within the coloured section there's also a trend away from almost everything being some shade of yellow, orange or brown towards a much broader range of hues. Blues, greens and purples seem much better represented. It looks to me like ~70% of the colours were basically "brown" in the 1800s, and now ~40% are white/gray/black. Seems more a reflection of modern objects being made more out of metal and plastic and less out of wood than anything else. Again, this is putting aside the clear bias in the samples here. I'm sure there are trends going on (and the car colour one seems legit to me) but I think this overblows it a little. Fashion ebbs and flows.

dr_orpheus 4y ago
I think there is also another bias in the samples they have in that a lot of the older items have developed some sort of patina/rust/aging. That tends to skew them in to the brown, dark grey and generally muted colors. If you watch the video there are a number of items that are old gears, chains and machinery.
antioppressor 4y ago
Open your eyes...
- dang 4y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we eventually have to ban such accounts, because it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

yusege 4y ago

It was mostly copper and gold colors in the beginning of the graphic. Then they found same ways to apply colors to objects. And we can't say anything now about if Color has been disappearing from world. The data and graphic is not complete. It could be demand and demand can change with time. People may be bored from black and grey in future and all the object colors would change.

mikkelam 4y ago

Eh, fashion is usually very cyclical. At some point, people will get tired of this and things will trend the other way. Same way as 90s-00s clothing is very popular these days.

angryGhost 4y ago
explains why I see white tank tops everywhere

zitterbewegung 4y ago

If you have a machine learning model that attempts to judge that color is disappearing from the world using pictures did they take into account that people now use cameras that change the color space of a photo to be more bland?

bombcar 4y ago

Once place color has been exploding is the power-tool market. Years ago almost every corded drill you could find was black or gray or maybe a dark red. Now each brand has their own color (offhand Dewalt Yellow, Milwaukee or Craftsman Red, Ryobi Nuclear Waste Green, etc). They're very bright and there's an argument it makes them easier to see on the job site, but it's also an important part of their branding, too, so much so that contractors will say things like "I hope yellow catches up with red, I really want a tool like that."

macintux 4y ago
I assumed it was to make it easier to identify the right battery packs.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Sadly almost all the battery packs are basically black with some accent colors (since they all now have rubberized protection).
tatersolid 4y ago
DeWalt tools have been bright yellow my entire life. I also remember Jimmy Carter being president, so they’ve been yellow for quite a while.

xwdv 4y ago

The real reason we’re seeing less color is because we’ve finally reached an enlightened state of taste where we begin to appreciate the unpretentious beauty of true neutrals. By taking away color, we can instead appreciate the beauty of pure shapes and natural lines or textures. Sometimes color can be so overpowering that all you see is a color, and the underlying object becomes harder to appreciate. I think the new McDonalds looks far better than the gawdy colorful looking one of the past. But I guess if you were a child with poor sense of style you may prefer the latter.

kradeelav 4y ago

Putting aside micro-design trends that come and go per decade given this has been happening for longer than just for one or two, my bet's on: a) corporations skewing towards multi-use capabilities (your camera is not just your camera, it's a phone, mobile computer, app machine, and camera all at once) and b) corporations trying to capture the maximum amount of dollars (said more uncharitably: cater to the lowest common denominator). There's a lot of sister comments here that mention that colors evoke strong responses - it can be good, but bean counters are going to cringe at every lost sale and agitate for neutrals. Personally I wish the transparent devices of the 90's would come back. seeing the internals was magical. :)

mrwh 4y ago

Dark grey houses, why? I've seen so many recently renovated and for sale houses painted the drabest colours and I really don't understand it at all. It's like a symbol for being tasteful, without actually having any taste.

Tao3300 4y ago

What if... color isn't disappearing, but grays are increasing? What if we've discovered beauty and excitement in black, white, and the shades in-between? Though I have happily owned purple, blue, red, and green cars in this century.

swayvil 4y ago

House remodeler here. Gray everything. That's what's popular. Light gray walls, medium gray trim, dark gray floor. We used to joke that it's a sure sign that the residents are cocaine/alcohol enthusiasts (because, yes, those people do indeed love gray). But now it's everywhere. Makes you think.

ur-whale 4y ago

> Color has been disappearing from the world ... and? Is that a bad thing for some reason?

nix0n 4y ago

Reminds me of Calvin's Dad's assertion that black-and-white photos are actually color photos of a black-and-white world: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09/ https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09/

glonq 4y ago
As a C&H fan, I definitely did convince my young daughter that the world used to be monochrome.

guywithahat 4y ago

The car color one can be explained; people used to order cars much more often than they do now, so you'd order exactly what you want including wacky colors. Now you're probably just going to buy what they have, which means they have to have non-offensive colors. Whether this is what happened to everything else is hard to say, but that's at least the short answer for vehicles

CTDOCodebases 4y ago

My personal theory is colour is stimulating and we are getting a lot of that stimulation by looking at screens all day. Living in a dull space counter acts that.

JasonFruit 4y ago

What does the hashtag "#tweet source removed as fascist tendencies have been pointed out" mean? I'm assuming they decided not to provide a source for information on this post because... they don't like the source? I hope I'm misunderstanding; if you're using a sketchy source, it's probably more important to note that, and you're still obligated to cite people you don't approve of.

mooreed 4y ago

I love the scientific discussion here, but much of this seems to miss the idea of “millennial minimalism”. The preference tends towards plain/simple buildings so that nature can have the main stage. Have no fear Gen Z is a pendulum towards radical 90s colors.

animal_spirits 4y ago

Color and style trends go hand in hand and in my opinion I think the loss of color is good for a more sustainable future. As style trends change people are more likely to trash old stuff for new stuff, and if the stuff is not strongly tied to any style-trend then it's likely people will not throw it away.

polynomial 4y ago

Related question of why TVs/displays basically only come in basic black. In some of the rooms in our home the TV is literally the only black thing in the entire room.

jjslocum3 4y ago

We get all our color from our screens now.

joshstrange 4y ago

For myself I've always bought the black (or whatever they call it this week) iPhone because I just assumed it would be the easiest to get and would have the highest/easiest resale. The resale is less of an issue as I'm just perpetually on the upgrade program now but I've always worried that getting a more exotic color could potentially push back my ship date. Maybe this year I'll try getting a color other than black. I just don't care much because I always put a (black) case on my phone so I don't imagine a colored iPhone would even be noticeable. As for cars and other places where I could pick color I often go with gray/black because it's more versatile, less "offensive", and doesn't require me to "commit" to a color. I'm fine with bland colors overall whereas I can't be sure that I'll like that blue/red/etc color in 1 week, month, year. Bland just feels like the safe choice, even if that's a silly reason.

jedberg 4y ago
My wife just got a new iPhone, and she picked the blue (we've both had black for a while now) and then she picked up a clear case specially so you could see the phone color underneath. She said, "If I'm gonna get the fancy color there is no point in covering it up with solid color case".

racl101 4y ago

A microcosm for me is not wanting to stand out in any way with the colors that I use to dress. More and more I fear people I encounter in train stations and down town. People are just nuttier and more radical. I don't know if it's the politics, COVID or increased drug usage. Anyway, I dress in drab colors and try not to stand out. I avoid strong reds, yellows, greens, blues, or anything that could make me stand out like national flag colors or rainbow representations. Don't wanna accidentally call attention on myself by showing any kind of allegiance to anything. Ironically, now I can afford clothes that I couldn't afford before but I no longer feel like I can spend money on things that are frivolous nor flashy for the reasons stated.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
npc

angst_ridden 4y ago

Our house has been a dark blue with white trim for over a decade. We built an expansion in our back yard, and painted it a fairly saturated purple. It's not visible from the street (except one very narrow angle). However, we received hate mail from neighbors who complained that the view from their 2nd story window into our back yard was spoiled, and that we should respect that we lived in society not in some hippy commune. Other neighbors regularly bring their visitors to stand at the one tiny piece of the sidewalk where they can look down our driveway to see the purple, and point and shake their heads and grouse about it. It's really kind of amazing how much hostility the color has generated. We used to be invited to neighborhood gatherings and cocktail parties and such. Now, because we callously refuse to repaint the extension and main house some sedate dull color, people literally won't speak to us. This isn't an HOA neighborhood; it's an artsy-boho community known for creative types and public murals. TL;DR people suck, colors are cool.

throw03172019 4y ago

Does this blog really need to trap the back button? Use history replace instead of push, please.

stalkerman 4y ago
Yep this is pretty poor. Took me several attempts to go back before I realised what was happening :(

powersnail 4y ago

Anecdotally, I look out from my window, and in the parking lot, there are 7 black, 6 white, 6 gray (of different shades), 3 red, 2 dark blue, 1 grayish blue, and 1 Windows-XP-blue cars. 7 out of 26 are colorful. I personally like bright color for little objects (pens, ties, socks, etc.), but black and white for the big things (like cars). The small stuff feels like silent, introverted rebellion. But pink cars and bright green houses? It's just too conspicuously salient. There's nowhere to hide. It invites too much attention, and grips so many eyeballs, that it makes me feel naked in a crowd.

tfandango 4y ago
I know some cars cost more to get a different color, like Teslas. They come in white, but if you want something like red, that's an extra $1000. I recently wanted to buy a car and [anecdotally also] the dealerships have like 90% black and white cars, and maybe there a couple of grey cars!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dwheeler 4y ago

I think it's just a current fashion. There's no point in complaining that fashions change; it's better to accept that they do. The skirt hems go up in some years; in other years they go down. Bell bottoms are in, then they are out. And so on. Fashions will keep changing, and it's OK :-).

VLM 4y ago

Should be linked to this previous HN story "Tracking Everything I Wore For 1 Year" from 52 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957210 I noticed in that previous story that the author spent almost the entire year wearing dark monochromatic gray clothes and very very dark shades of blue. One theory I would propose is followers follow, and if everything around a person from house colors to car colors to, well, everything, is bland and colorless, then they will follow, and drive even more people into blandness, until essentially everything is merely a shade of gray.

ladyattis 4y ago

It's kind of funny realizing how much I try to add color and patterns to my clothing and house décor probably due to being someone who suffers from depression. Basically, more color and visual variety seems to mitigate some of the worse effects of depression for me especially in winter.

raydev 4y ago

On the subject of cars, the effect is far more pronounced in Canada vs the southern US. Every time I go down south I'm struck by the sheer variety of year models and colors. When I return to Canada and spend a few hours on the 401 or visit the Maritimes, most cars are white/silver/gray/black and they're all made in the last 10 years. The age thing I understand (salt damage), but the lack of color doesn't make any sense.

gartdavis 4y ago

One way to think about this is that color is information. We have a processing capacity for this information that became fully saturated somewhere between 1967 and 1973, and since then we've been creating a surplus that everyone has to filter out as noise. In that context, it makes sense to me that consumers (and marketers, and product designers) now choose simplicity over the radiant chaos of Jackson Pollock, Peter Max, or Ronald McDonald.

worik 4y ago

I like it!

nloa 4y ago

rogierhofboer 4y ago

Immediately thought about the movie "Corpse Bride" from Tim Burton, where the world of the living is grey and the world of the dead is very colourful. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0121164/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0121164/

NIL8 4y ago

Something I don't see mentioned is how over the last century manufacturers chose to use colors that would disguise the staining and discolouration caused by tobacco smoke. This is especially true of products designed for office use. The Commodore 64 is a good example.