How gray became the king of color | Hacker News Reader

How gray became the king of color

fastcompany.com

63 pointsmarban55 comments

This seems like it would be well explained by Hotelling's Law [0], which has been discussed here on HN before [1][2]. Harold Hotelling called this (rather on the nose, in fact) back in 1929 [3]:

> The tremendous standardisation of our furniture, our houses, our clothing, our automobiles and our education are due in part to the economies of large-scale production, in part to fashion and imitation. But over and above these forces is the effect we have been discussing, the tendency to make only slight deviations in order to have for the new commodity as many buyers of the old as possible, to get, so to speak, between one's competitors and a mass of customers.

Certainly, grey tends to be the most neutral between the colors and therefore it seems reasonable that products would gravitate towards it (as according to Hotelling's Law) to try to capture as much of the possible of the market.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10787515

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17166934

[3]: https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2224214

One more relevant discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24742253

> grey tends to be the most neutral between the colors and therefore it seems reasonable that products would gravitate towards it

This argument would convince me if it were not technically so easy nowadays to offer most products in a variety of colours. Especially for large-scale production the cost of offering some variety in colour should be marginal. So instead of just going "grey", why not offer a palette of colours to try to capture as much of possible of the market?

Where I see the dominance of grey most clearly is modern buildings, from single residential right through to large commercial. In those cases the owners want to appeal to as many buyers as possible but don't have a large number to offer (usually just a single building). Unfortunately grey makes some sense in that case. I think it really started to become ubiquitous as housing came to be seen more as an investment (why paint something in a colour you like if it means it will be harder to get a good price on the market?)

> Especially for large-scale production the cost of offering some variety in colour should be marginal.

No?

You need to overproduce more items that might not get sold, you need more floor space to have all the variants on offer all the time. It's less efficient than a single variant. Whether that's "marginal" depends on the product. It's not like everything is gray.

But what about cars? Many of them are only built after they have been ordered. Nevertheless, we also have the trend towards black, white and grey here. At a classic car meeting, on the other hand, you see so many different, often much more appealing colours and combinations. Why was it so different in the past?

Most people also consider the need to sell the car down the line. Choosing the colour that maximizes your chances (or at least copying what every one else dose in the hope that it helps).

It wasn't. Classic cars are a biased set. Interesting ones have been kept and boring ones are not.

I'd also wager that most classic cars you see around these days have been repainted. When the cost to repaint is roughly the same why not go for an interesting color over gray or white?

Post-war mass production was many decades old by the 1970's when Orange and Yellow were the dominant colors, and everything in our lives (cars, furniture, buildings, appliances, etc.) was vastly more colorful.

At least it’s not Japan where at least 80% of cars are white or maybe silver.

With regard to house colors… muted is good. There is less reaction to the colors you cannot avoid seeing. I’ve had relatives with big bright colors… it’s kitsch. It’s good for five minutes, after that you want some neutral colors to rest your eyes.

If you ignore fashion and/or aesthetics, there are good reasons for white or gray/silver cars. Gray/silver is good for hiding dirt, so you don't have to wash it as often. White is cooler in the summer, and white is very visible so there's a (slightly) lower chance of being involved in a collision.

And what I hear is other colors are hard to patch / fix while black will show scratch mark very clearly

>white is very visible

Not so much when there's snow on the ground or in fog.

Well, yes and no. There's two major components to visibility, the light intensity and contrast with the background. Against a background of fresh white snow, a white car will obviously not be the best choice. However, in most cases winter driving, at least where I live, is not driving in fresh white snow. But rather snow around the roads is kind of dirty and grayish, frequently the snow has been eroded away from the road surfaces. The problem from a visibility standpoint is that it's often kinda dark as the sun doesn't get that high in the sky in the winter and often during normal commute times the sun is down. In such cases a white car has an advantage, being the most reflective color.

So all in all, well, I haven't seen a study wrt winter visibility, so I'm just making things up, but I'd think white is far from the worst, certainly better than dark colors. Probably some color like lime yellow or such that you frequently see on emergency vehicles would be better, but few people choose a color like that for a civilian car.

Generally true but a thousand of Japanese live in massive snowy area so it could be more problem. Still IMO black is the worst color for visibility because night is come everyday in every location.

taste is in the eye of the beholder

While OP did call something kitsch the point he was making did not have anything to do with taste.

It had everything in the world to do with taste. The wish to "rest eyes" is fundamentally wish based on taste. The grey being "the" resting color, rather then palette of other muted colors is also matter of taste.

Or Turkmenistan, where it is illegal to have a car that is not white or silver.

Reading this article in a Copenhagen street. Houses built in the 1700s, and are a rich orange. Every car parked in the street is monochrome: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChSUWOgsnoA/

Nice! Great that people have the choice to get their preferred color and didn't feel unduly pressured to match some centuries-old drab orange color. I once lived in a house that was remodeled in the 1970s and it had horrible garish orange carpet and green vinyl floors! Very happy with my white car.

The orange was part of the 70s "earth tone" aesthetic.

https://flashbak.com/when-living-rooms-went-brown-earth-toni...

Not sure what happened with the floors, but I would guess they were older. 60s, maybe, and not upgraded because they sprang for new carpet but not linoleum?

This is sarcasm, but people unfamiliar with Copenhagen might not be aware. Some historic buildings use this shade of yellow, produced using iron vitriol (iron (ii) sulphate) and whitewash.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyboder

And https://www.reddit.com/r/copenhagen/comments/hylj0b/orange_w...

It's not sarcasm. I'm voicing an opinion which -- despite the vast majority of people preferring grays blacks and whites -- is considered uncouth and offensive. I've seen a few articles like this discussed recently, it's apparently considered a bad thing. It's sign of how dreary people are, or how they've become cogs in the corporate machine, or some other portent of how much worse the common folk are.

Same in Germany (2020).

Gray 30.3%

Black 24.8%

White 20.6%

Blue 10.9%

Red 7.2%

Brown 1.3%

Yellow, green, orange (not in combination, I think) 1.1%

https://www.t-online.de/auto/technik/id_88367288/auto-diese-...

> Yellow, green, orange (not in combination, I think)

That would be quite a lot of VW Harlekins[1] otherwise :D

[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:VW_Polo_III_Harlekin.J...

Is there a way to see that Instagram picture without logging in? Sounds interesting.

When I spent 3 months backpacking India (twice), coming back was among others a fashion shock. Indian wardrobe is so colorful! A lot of orange, red, pink, blue.

Then comes the western depressing 'fashion'. In winter months, practically whole cities dress in some variant of black or grey. The only ones often not following the trend are LGBTQ+ communities, sometimes. But even in summer, colors mentioned above are a rare sight. I stick out of crowd with my orange shirt like a sore thumb.

Same with cars - I hate grey cars with passion, it tells me the owner (at least first buyer) has 0 imagination, passion or well f*k any clue what pretty is. OK, worse things happen in life but seeing sport cars for >200k$ in f**ing grey or white makes sad view of something that should inspire envious looks and smiles (sound usually makes up for a bit, but still).

Same. And as an older guy, it's even harder to wear something else than light grey to dark grey.

At least at home and outside of work, I try to buy as many colorful (sometimes oriental) cloths as possible.

I wonder whether our infatuation with grey just mirrors the rise of depression in society.

>it tells me the owner (at least first buyer) has 0 imagination, passion or well f*k any clue what pretty is.

You're looking into this too much - I (and most people) buy whatever color is on the lot when I get there.

Any color discussed long enough becomes gray.

I was taking flight this summer after 6 years and was quite surprised during landing in Prague to see colors of parked cars in parking lot next to terminal, to my surprise the most common color was not grey/silver, but actually black/white despite common knowledge grey/silver should be the most popular choice, but when I look at my street it doesn't seem to hold anymore.

Even my risk averse father who always bought silver/grey cars to easier resell them had already last few cars black, he has now officially dark blue Mazda, but let's not kid ourselves it's black, if you dunno.

Green is pretty rare car color to see in Prague, one would think it would be more popular, but you will have more luck even with different shades of orange.

What's the methodology behind the stacked line graph, "Percent of pixels, across all photos"? Somewhat perplexing that this visualization contains data as far back as the early 1800s, but then, to conclude that the world described by daguerreotypes was more colorful?

The year is the year of the object, not the year when the photo was taken.

https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...

Fascinating link, thank you! On that note though: How are the horizontal bars (first one right below the introduction) made? My guess is that they gathered all colours from all pixels, made a histogram, and then converted that into a horizontal stacked bar. However, the ordering seems weird, as some colours look like they appear multiple times (say for example the almost black-ish regions), disproving my histogram hypothesis. Then again, that may be due to image compression. And ordering the colour vectors would highly depend on the used colour space & the used partial order. I similarly stumbled over the image-version of these bars in section "The colours within a single object" further down, which I just don't quite understand how they're made.

Does someone have insight on the methodology or maybe a link to a paper? The present methodology section seems to focus on object similarity.

I've only been looking at older houses and I assumed gray tones had something to do with old movies or Leave it To Beaver being black and white.

Greys are more modern palettes. It wasn’t very popular prior to the late ‘90s to early 2000s and beyond. Much inspired by movies with “architecture” as central accent.

Outside of buildings going full brutalist or neoclassical or stone, gray was rare in the 20th century. I’ve seen lots of mid-century bungalow houses for sale repainted in gray with monochrome trim. It’s dreadfully boring, but it’s good web design.

Fun fact: the dreary gray walls in The Addams Family, as filmed in black and white, were actually a strong pink in real life.

Right gray wasn't part of people's color palette interior or exterior (aside from natural material colors as you point out). I think maybe there was some rust-proofing that was grey. Grey in the home came along with the ascendance of stainless steel appliances to go with it. But now it's common in the HGTV/Fixer upper shows along with the shiplap fad. We just need them to add ultra high performance lightweight concrete to the fad mix.

The true colorized version of classic films is fascinating! (in some instances they take clues from preserved wardrobes)

"Fifty Shades of Grey" has been much misunderstood; clearly it refers to the colour choices on modern cars. :-/

The thing about grey is that it is easy to paint over to get a decent effect.

It's also neutral so it can handle either warm or cool palettes which is nice. I just moved and everything is warm and noisy, now my furniture looks mismatched because it's all black and uniform with hard lines. I feel like painting is a greater investment than buying new furniture, so why not opt for something where a new floor, paint, and trim isn't necessary in most cases?

There is a lot of fancy theorising, but its basically down to one thing: fashion.

In architecture, for the last 10 years, there has been a move to adding BLACK (not just dark, but #000) to buildings. Be that through carbonised wood, paint or metal cladding.

However, black, outside of a few applications, is a stupid colour for modern buildings. It gets hot, it collects dust, and degrades pretty quickly (unless its carbonised wood)

Then in LA about 5 years ago, people started dicking about with grey. Having got bored with the Italianate white/blue combo (or perhaps Jardin Majorelle blue) There is also a natural reaction to do something new, which means rejecting what cam immediately before.

this has gradually translated into grey shit for houses. Here in the UK, people are getting grey window frames, and sometimes painting the house grey. it should really be banned as it makes the house indistinguishable from the sky, which is a traffic hazard.

Personally when I got my house painted, I wanted a huge fucking rainbow down the side. But the wife overruled me. She wanted grey, I said no, so we agreed on titanium white, which has a pleasing algal green to it now in places.

> painting the house grey [...] should really be banned as it makes the house indistinguishable from the sky

I was very confused until I reread the comment and realized you were in the UK.

The whole grey windows thing is so odd. I can see the argument that white uPVC can actually look out of place, but the grey makes no sense and will look dated very soon imo. We were house hunting in 2020 and saw so many houses with it.

We opted for gray PVC windows. They matched the style of the house, pseudo wood PVC looks ugly and real wood, the preferred solution, was unaffordable. That was 9 years ago.

It all depends on the house so, on other houses wood / wood like looks way better and gray would just be ugly.

> it should really be banned as it makes the house indistinguishable from the sky, which is a traffic hazard.

Is there a joke here that I am missing? If not: how it is traffic hazard?

Because the stereo type of the UK is that the sky is grey and rainy, thus a grey house with grey windows and grey furnishings would be invisible.

Is it possible for project approval time to be related to color?

I would imagine a lot more would file comments against building a yellow house versus a bland gray one.

> Lilac house in Watford conservation area rejected by council

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-5873041...

> Court rules woman can keep her red and white striped townhouse

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/24/red-white-st...

Indeed for a conservation area (the first one) or a conservation area with exceptionally rich people living near buy (the second one, people often having millions in disposable income) it can be challenging to paint your house something unorthodox.

but that is only a tiny part of the country. It is pretty rare in a normal area to have to ask for permission to change house colour. The concept of a HoA doesn't really apply here in the UK (there are some special cases for ex-council houses, or leasehold properties)

«Risk-averse companies narrowed the color palette on the assembly line, and risk-averse consumers did the rest. Driven by the promise of resale, Americans are chromatically sheepish when it comes to big-ticket purchases, painting their homes gray (or neutral colors) and driving gray cars. (According to a 2020 survey, more than 72% of cars on the road—read: cars that people bought—were either black, white, or gray.)»

> Symbolized by “the little black dress,” fashion has long had an obsession with black, and to an extent, the data confirms this.

I don't care what the data confirms, there's nothing that makes a woman look better than a little black dress.

> there's nothing that makes a woman look better than a little black dress.

White woman, maybe? Different skin colors require different fashion. That also applies to grey, at least for clothes.

It works for women of all colors.

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