Color has been disappearing from the world | Hacker News Reader

Color has been disappearing from the world

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356 pointsbeatthatflight289 comments

I found the source article much more illuminating: 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.

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.

Open your eyes...

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 and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

The video in that article illustrates your point quite nicely by displaying the palette at each point in time. The early years are dominated by wood grain colors and gold. I'd wager gold being overrepresented in a sample based on museum items.

It then switches away from wood to more grayscale plastics. Until the 60s, when brightly colored plastics take over.

And only quite recently has "billet" stainless steel and aluminium become a "common" material for consumer goods (as opposed to types like die cast which don't have a finish that's usually left unpainted).

Both these materials require fairly advanced techniques to produce at scale. Firstly the actual materials themselves are fairly hard to get good alloys of.

Secondly, they are hard to machine well, especially stainless steel, which really needs extremely rigid machinery and high speed carbine tooling. Not only that, but to machine the shapes of things that would previously have been plastic, you really need CNC, which again, only recently has become economical for many consumer goods.

Scientific instruments and tools meanwhile would be using brass, as it's much more amenable to machining. Milling a brass billet on a manual mill is a joy and results are good, stainless is a misery, and the results are horrible.

And as to why plastic things were so garish a few decades ago? Maybe firstly they were new and it was unusual to even be able to have such colours. Early plastics were ahead of the dye chemistry, so they were much more "natural".

Secondly, it's actually hard to have good silver finishes (you can have grey): many of the high end products were silver, but it was usually a coating which would come off and reveal the milky plastic. White is also hard because UV stabilization was also not as mature, so it would yellow quickly[1]. It was easier to have a solid colour, and the brighter the better in terms of hiding moulding defects.

[1] It also seems only fairly recently that you can get the really deep gloss jet black plastic, rather than the dull, very dark grey like a cassette tape body.

To non-technical people, polished stainless, aluminum, and chrome are indistinguishable, and chrome was utterly dominant in the automotive field before the 1980s.

Automotive yes, and standard profiles like tubes, but not smaller consumer goods because it's very expensive to tool up for a chromed item due to the finish needed on the substrate (without CNC, remember). For example a chrome case for a telephone handset would be brutally expensive compared to plastic (until metallised plastic was developed).

I think it's high time for "garishness" to make a comeback, at least in the realm of handheld electronics. It's exasperating, the belief product designers have that every phone or remote control has to be of such a color that one can't tell the devices apart or spot one of them from across the room.

In my naive observation, another explanation is that modern lights also tend to lean toward colder blueish hues than they did in ye-olden days, that were dominated by warmer, lower Kelvin hues more similar to that of candle light. Even looking back at photos from the 60s, interior lights were generally warmer than those of today.

Also consider the aging process or capture medium of the photo samples from time past.

Also, brown and yellow used to be much easier and cheaper shades of paint to make vs whites, blues, or reds (depending on the material to be painted).

For example, stop signs in the US, while always intended to be red, were originally painted yellow, because there wasn't a red paint cheap or durable enough at the time the traffic standards were developed.

As technology caught up and new paints/dyes developed, the yellow signs were replaced with red ones.

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.

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.

Salads are gone. https://fortune.com/2022/06/09/mcdonalds-is-scrapping-parfai...

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.

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.

We still have all day breakfast out in Seattle, just not the full menu. My go to is sausage patty, round egg, yellow cheese.

Yum yeah... That's the one I miss!

I always wondered how they get the eggs so round but one time I saw them make them.. They fry the egg on the burger plate but in a metal ring. Cool idea.

Meanwhile in Canada we got to keep all-day breakfast, but lost out on a handful of only-at-breakfast items. McGriddles were gone, but came back around January of this year. Breakfast McWraps were also taken away but haven't yet returned (far superior to Tim Horton's farmers wraps, IMO). Otherwise I don't think the lunch/dinner menu changed at all.

what the hell does COVID have to do with the all-day breakfast though? How does cancelling it in any way mean anything for COVID policies or spread?

It doesn't. For a while the Mcds near me had a reduced menu, probably because they had less business and a reduced menu was easier to maintain. But it's back to normal now, including all-day breakfast (Canada).

Gone entirely. Here in Spain it was never served all day. Until 10:30 or so they served only the breakfast menu and after that only the regular one.

So now it's the regular menu all day. Big mac for breakfast? Hmmm. No.

In fact I've never seen all-day breakfast at any McDonald's in Europe and I've traveled a lot for work (so a lot of hit & run breakfasts at airports)

Ah, that explains it. We went to Mallorca last year (from Iceland where I've lived for a few years after leaving the US) and I was SUPER excited about McD's breakfast, only to find they sold nothing but burgers :(

Yeah it's sad, I agree. Their breakfast is lovely, and it was one of the few places to get something like this, most places serve more Spanish style stuff like a sandwich with a potato omelet in between. In fact McDonald's even had their own version of this one too. But they also did the usual ones.

> Resale value is way too forward thinking for a corporation these days, it's all about short term profit

This is a commonly repeated trope that is just wrong. Corporations are very forward looking. Consider the price earnings ratio of the S&P500. It's been on a general upward trend since the 80s, only disrupted by recessions and stock market crashes [0]. That means stock holders are willing to invest more money for future earnings. Discount rates are also very low historically which means future earnings are discounted at a lower rate.

Similarly the number of companies that earn no profit is very high:

> Of the largest 1,500 companies by market capitalization today, around 200 weren’t profitable during any of the last three years. But instead of punishing them, investors have rewarded them with a total market value of more than $2.3 trillion. Wall Street hasn’t been willing to attach such high market values to unprofitable companies since the late 1990s (and even then, the total market valuation of the unprofitable companies wasn’t even half of what it is now). [1]

Private R&D spending is also on an upward trend since the 50s as a percentage of GDP, displacing much of federal spending in R&D. [2]

Everywhere you look you'll see long term thinking is rewarded. The only place you hear complaints about "short term profit" is corporate managers that want cover for bad results. They can always say they're "investing for the future" and their investments will take a decade to pan out, but conveniently they won't be around by then.

I doubt you can find any Excel valuation template that's used in business school that does not include resale value. You can bet the people in charge of purchasing McDonald's real estate look very closely at resale value.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclically_adjusted_price-to-e...

[1] https://money.com/stock-market-companies-no-profits/

[2] https://cglife.com/blog/recent-trends-in-rd-spending-the-lan...

Please stop posting this. It only makes Marx's falling rate of profit[1] look correct.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...

I don't get it. Is this some kind of ideological self-censorship? We're not supposed to talk about this even though it's true because it might make Marxists happy?

What exactly are we supposed to be gaining by burying our heads in the sand and refusing to talk about high-valuation unprofitable companies?

> Nope. Resale value is way too forward thinking for a corporation these days, it's all about short term profit.

This kind of blanket statement is almost always wrong about anything in the messy real world.

But it's especially wrong in this case. McDonald's is effectively a real estate company[0] that has been growing over ~80 years.

[0] https://thestrategystory.com/2020/09/24/mcdonalds-real-estat...

> But it's especially wrong in this case. McDonald's is effectively a real estate company[0] that has been growing over ~80 years.

I don't think this contradicts the contention that McDonald's is too short-term in its thinking to be worried about resale value.

Yes, they're a real estate company. But most of that real estate is never sold or rented to anyone other than McDonald's franchisees.

I think they designed the stores this way because they believe -- and probably have troves of data to support them -- that this style of architecture is better for their restaurants too.

Maybe just cheaper to build and only loses 5% of the brand recognition when the giant arches are still on a sign out front.

> McDonald's is too short-term in its thinking

It's not credible that a corporation that grows from one restaurant into world dominance is guilty of "short-term" thinking.

It's equally un-credible to pretend the people who were making decisions 30 years ago are the same people making decisions today. Or to pretend that the type of thinking required to grow a restaurant into a juggernaut is the same type of thinking that maintains the juggernaut. Or that a corporation beholden to the desires of shareholders won't change behavior as the desires of those shareholders change.

Why would the shareholders want short term thinking? Stock valuations are based on future expected profits.

Short term thinking leads to a crashing stock value, followed by bankruptcy.

Investors don't want that.

...are you really arguing corporations aren't driven by quarterly and annual results?

If I do something today, and the corporation benefits in 10 years, I don't get the credit for that. Whoever has my role in 10 years gets the credit.

I completely agree that corporations SHOULD think long-term. But I fail to see much evidence of that.

If you want to argue that Ray Kroc had a long-term vision, you'd probably be right. But I very much doubt today's management thinks that far out.

> But I fail to see much evidence of that.

Every large company on the stock exchange is evidence of that.

> are you really arguing corporations aren't driven by quarterly and annual results?

Have you ever seen companies beat their quarterly earnings estimates, and yet their stock drops? That's because the shareholders were suspicious that those results were short term, and the long term outlook didn't look so hot.

Any shareholder that is suspicious that a corporation has sacrificed the long term for short term profits, is going to dump that stock. Wouldn't you?

Investors are not a single unified hive mind. Some people don't care about long term profitability - they are just in a relatively short-term position and want profits now in the form of dividends and increased price. Some people want the valuation and/or price to go down because they hold short positions. Some people want the company to forego dividends in favor of investment into long-term expansion while other people are hoping for those dividends as part of their retirement income. This is true for institutions too - they have all sorts of reasons to prefer short term gain as much as they want long term gain.

Haha, the stock will tank on bad future prospects faster than you can sell. Being a short-termer in a stock only works if the other stockholders are in it for longer than you are, and believe in the long-term prospects.

Dividends are not a sign of short term investing. When the company's profits decline from short term thinking, the dividends disappear.

BTW, if you identify a company that is short-terming, and the other investors haven't caught on and tanked the stock, you can make a mint by shorting the stock. Got any success stories at that? Have you made money shorting McDonald's?

You understand that the operators of the McDonald's don't own the building? The owners of the building have obvious incentives.

It's not even a long-term vs short-term thing.

The boring building increases your capitalization as a holding more, allowing you to financialize it more.

Happy meals have both fries and apple slices. Source: have children.

Red Delicious?

I think they are Grannies. Taste pretty good. But there is an option for fries and apples or double fries. So pretty much it's almost always double fries.

Good.

My friend grew up with a hatred for apples because her school cafeteria served only Red Delicious.

Best apple I ever had was a Pippin.

Could be worse, they could have been the cardboardy golden delicious.

Dont just open your argument with 'Nope'. It makes you sound like an ass. Like the people who start with 'sorry' and then go on to demonstrate that they're not in fact sorry.

You could say, 'Ive always thought' or 'I have evidence that demonstrates that your point isn't totally correct' or something that respects the original poster a bit more than outward dismissal.

It's also possible they're both correct.

Nope is more attention-grabbing, the real question is whether it is better to optimize for civility or attention.

You see this with auto dealerships, etc. as well. There's a real tendency to stock the neutral white, silver, black, grey colors rather than brighter colors which I assume are more polarizing. If someone needs a car, stock cars that pretty much everyone will live with given the need, as opposed to cars that some may love but others wouldn't be caught dead in.

They'll stock the reds and yellows, but usually in the convertible, and the one parked out on the corner of the lot where it catches your eye.

The vast majority of the vehicles are ordered in colors that will sell. Some auto companies assign vehicles to dealers, others let the dealer pick the options on the ones they're getting, and the dealers know what will sell (and upsell).

Plus it's a huge computational problem, there's huge worth in having the car the customer wants configured just right for her, the day she walks into the dealership. It's an easier sell that much is true, but it's a better sell for her because she gets everything she wanted when she wanted it, which is worth more to her in money. End up splitting the difference. Otherwise it's like, order it (I think there's a paper options menu you tick boxes off of) and wait, wait two weeks, and maybe it won't even arrive in two weeks because of delays (more common now in the twenties) so it's a huge CPU-intensive task. Then also they rent a lot of GPUs to get real-time pixel-something...like rendering a car with all the options the tire-kicker wants so he can see the whole car when buying online. That's cool, that's tech, that's computationally difficult.

>wait two weeks

You wish. The situation is slowly improving but I had to wait 6 weeks for a car earlier this summer that was "in transit" (which I guess was to say it existed in the manufacturer's database someplace). This wasn't even a build to order vehicle. I suspect that would have been months.

I'm not sure where computational power enters into it. It's just that dealers want to mostly have cars on their lot which are acceptable to the greatest number of buyers who want/need a car right now which the model in hot pink isn't going to be for a lot of people.

Yeah I've never been to a dealership, let alone during covid. Yeah the wait times I have heard are super super long. Two weeks is like the best case these days. So mostly it's about uh...not getting a chargeback frankly. Something. Keeping you waiting.

An allegory.[1]

................

A random finds a fifty-dollar bill on the streets, exclaims, "Oh I'll go to a restaurant!" She gets there and is like "OK that chicken á la" squints "no not the French...the Adobe uh..." then waiter says "Adobado. That'll be $23.99." "Up front? Wait wai--" "Need the money to go buy the ingredients in the first place!"

.................

Yeah so they gotta mask that.

[1] Not claiming I'm any special anything, sticking to the true story I'm a slave of GOD, but that's irrelevant, anybody can say allegories. Maybe the parables are the ones that are for prophets only...maybe I'm thinking of that. Oh well. Best I can do. Used every other literary device by this point, in my attempt of elevating hn posts to an art form.

In the last few years I've seen a lot more of these "flat-ish" paint colors on new cars. They've got a gloss finish, but the color coat reminds me of a battleship, truck, tank, or other military vehicle. Initially they really stood out to me because they were different than the usual car paint colors / formulations (lacking any metallic element and being much less "shiny").

I know I report my car's paint color to the DMV when I registered it. (Paint colors are also encoded in many manufacturers' VINs, I believe.) It would be neat to make some kind of visualization of car paint color popularity over time using DMV data.

The article has a chart showing car paint color over time.

Below is the direct link to that chart. I thought the small surge of brown cars starting in 2010 was interesting.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...

Matte finish cars are almost always wraps, and the finish is often times very difficult to keep clean. They're popular with expensive sports cars specifically because they are "exclusive".

Indeed, the flat colors are just non-metallic and non-pearl coats. Its a sign of changing fashion trends -- flat coats used to be far more popular in the era before all paints had metallic flake (basically glitter). They only stand out because metallic paints became very common as opposed to being once rare.

> There's a real tendency to stock the neutral white, silver, black, grey colors rather than brighter colors which I assume are more polarizing.

i think it's further up the chain than the dealership. when i've taken a look, most of the manufacturer colors were fairly neutral. there might be blues and reds, but they're muted. the dealership couldn't buy something bright unless they're selling kawasaki motorcycles.

Also, the more expensive cars get, the more boring the color options become. Small cars are sometimes available in fun colors, but big cars are only available in shades of grey.

I see a lot of teslas with crazy flat bright paintjobs, i assume aftermarket?

Significant numbers of commercial buildings like that simply get razed to the ground when the tenant leaves. It's cheaper for the new tenant to build the building they want than adapt to the older one.

Which is why you only find "reused iconic buildings" in parts of the city that are now more run-down.

> Which is why you only find "reused iconic buildings" in parts of the city that are now more run-down.

This isn't true at all - city centres often have protection for their historic iconic buildings. In somewhere like central London the majority of buildings are reused iconic buildings. You'll find McDonalds locations in Georgian town-houses for example.

Isn't your example the opposite situation? You're talking about an active McDonalds in a non-McDonalds structure, you replied to a comment talking about a non-McDonalds in a visibly McDonalds structure.

In your example, the McDonalds had to make do with the existing building which they aren't allowed to change. In the other example, non-McDonalds have to make do with an un-renovated McDonalds structure which they can't afford to change. You aren't providing a counter example, you're just talking about something different.

I don’t think any purpose-built McDonalds could be described as ‘iconic’ architecture?

Iconic as literally being an "icon" of the company - the same as the Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, etc "unique building silhouette".

Things as documented by: https://twitter.com/utbaph?lang=en

A McDonalds that is built into Westminster Abbey may be part of an iconic building, but the McDonalds isn't Iconic (nor is the one on the Champs-Élysées).

Give it 100 years so that there's enough people nostalgic for it around.

Or, even, you don't have to! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_McDonald%27s_restaurant "Along with its sign, it was deemed eligible for addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, although it was not added because the owner objected"

McDonalds is more of a real estate company these days, so that might actually be their plan.

https://thestrategystory.com/2020/09/24/mcdonalds-real-estat...

I agree with this. If a rental doesnt have white walls wood floors or dull tiles I wont rent it. White walls makes a place feel spacious and I want my white furniture to match.

>Commodification incentivizes regression to some mean.

I'd frame it alternatively: optimization incentivizes uniformity. Inefficiencies are ruthlessly filtered out of the system. A wacky color scheme reduces might reduce profits by x%, so all fast food restaurants will tend towards the same boxy boring structure.

Another example of this for me is sports. Take baseball for example: in the past, you had so many different styles of players. Pitchers had unique and funky delivery types. It gave the game character. Now? If you're not optimizing your style of play to deliver the highest value according to the stats, you're costing yourself tens of millions of dollars. All the character of the game is slowly being wrung out.

This pattern is obviously being played across every domain in every part of life. It's pretty sad but entirely rational from every individual actor's point of view. And furthermore, it seems like an issue that's impossible to fix in a world of infinite information.

Your framing is a piece of the general principle as far as I am aware. It's a multipolar trap that is hard to see because we're embedded in it, and in the short term a lot of actions appear rational, but have externalities that are only felt in the long term.

SSC's Meditations on Moloch is one of the best (and longest) essays I've read on this maximization issue.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

https://www.worldanvil.com/w/parastellis/a/multipolar-trap-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

I don't know. Even things that won't be resold arnt colorful anymore. All the parks near me with children's playground equipment in Ohio, city/school all of them, are now a olive green, tan, and gray color scheme. The actual quality and variety of the installments are leaps and bounds ahead of what I had as a kid, but they look more like military obstacle course training than a place for preschoolers to run around in

Nothing says adequate dining like that big beige M.

re: Housing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_ladies) In San Francisco there's the tradition of painting your home as a "painted lady" which means you painted the home using 3 contrasting colors. Also there are some that have painted in this matte black painted as well which are definitely a striking appearance

> Commodification incentivizes regression to some mean.

Ironically, one of the places where you can reliably find colourful stuff is Ikea, which commoditised furniture and household items in general.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

Back in college I bought the only car I could afford at the time, a '69 AMC Rambler station wagon painted pink with purple stripes on the hoods.. This was mid 90's in Atlanta and I got all kinds of positive comments about that car. Which was weird, being the introvert I was. My wife still says she's glad she met me before seeing my car, lol.

I personally dont find this to be true, its not only resale value, this might apply to expensive things, but other more daily things like phones, phone covers, etc, always have black/white as the most selling color.

This IMO is just a social change, people just like monochrome colors.

I wanted a yellow in the used car I was looking for. It was incredibly hard to find and because the color was rare, you have to compromise on everything else. I believe the resale goes up but it takes longer to sell.

All of my cars have been silver or grey because those were my choices buying off the lot and I didn't want to pay extra and wait to get one from the factory in a more interesting color.

Offtopic: I really like the UI of that forum.

The curators have put a lot of work into it to make it resemble our old home. A very friendly UI and community.

It's the successor to a Kinja site that used to be closely affiliated with Jalopnik, before it was detached (when one of the contributors misrepresented themselves as a Jalopnik author for borrowing cars for reviews); eventually all of the unofficial boards were entirely kicked off Kinja by the new G/O Media ownership.

I gotta admit, when I bought my sports car (2022 BRZ) I specifically ordered it in white. It wasn't a resale value thing (I don't think I ever plan to sell it!), I just thought the various colors were a bit too garish -- it already has a pretty striking profile in white.

I kind of see what the article is saying, but if I'm perfectly honest I can't say it bothers me. I sort of like having beige carpets and beige walls, sometimes too much color just feels visually noisy.

The pictures from the 1970s kind of amuse me; I've always contended that the 1970s might have been the (visually) ugliest decade ever. It's colorful but not in a good way..

I'll occasionally see cars like that - bright pink, or some other bright colour, and they always make me smile. I've taken to describing them as "a car that I'd never want to own, but I'm really glad it exists". Like the pink camo-wrapped Dodge Charger that I occasionally see tootling around town - do I want to own a Charger and do it up in pink camouflage? Absolutely not. Am I glad that the option exists and somebody has availed themselves of it? Absolutely yes.

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

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.

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.

As an Australian living in Norway, i was amazed by how much color the buildings have here.

At least when I was in Mexico the pastels made sense, because the outsides of the buildings would get dusty pretty quickly, and pastels look fine under dust, but bright colors get muted and look a bit weird.

And not everyone would wash their houses, and it didn't rain much.

> It's not unusual to hear a UK expat in Australia say they left the place because they could not stand the depressing weather.

I did too, I lived in Ireland for a while but I couldn't stand the depressing weather and short days in winter. It didn't help that I lived on the west coast which is even worse than the east. Many weeks of non-stop grey and rain.

I live in Spain now and it really helped my mood. Wages are lower here but quality of life is so much better. Not just in terms of weather but socially too, because people live outdoors more.

I lived 2 years in Australia as well which has a similar climate but it was too far from family.

> It's not unusual to hear a UK expat in Australia say they left the place because they could not stand the depressing weather.

Note that by definition that is a biased set. Some people's concept of fun is limited to high intensity sunshine on a beach, personally I like the weather in the UK which feels quite balanced compared to many countries, and ideal for a lot of outdoor activities... Although this year it's been a bit on the hot side, probably not by comparison to Australia, which is why I can't imagine living in Australia, i'd constantly be too hot to want to do anything more than sit on my arse and drink beer.

It's possible people who find this weather depressing are in a depressing setting of suburbia where only intense sunshine could possibly make it appear less gloomy - maybe they just needed to get out and enjoy the wilderness more.

I’m absolutely with you. While I want some sun and sunny days, I much prefer overcast and even rainy days. In fact, I’m one who will probably relocate at some point to a place that fits that better.

I think the relationship with ambient light may be important, but shouldn't the trend have gone the other way for the latter 19th and early 20th centuries then? As more people shifted from being involved in some form of agricultural or other outdoor manual labor to factory and office jobs, wouldn't we have seen a greater demand for bright colors as people spent more time inside?

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!!

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.

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.

My preference is mostly greys with, as you say, color accents. Maybe orange curtains, or a blue couch.

Part of the appeal of course of a grey interior is that you can just drop in green upholstered chairs and not have to try and match the walls.

Gray walls are one thing, ruining perfectly good wood floors with gray finish is another thing, and a lot more expensive to fix than a coat of paint. Not to mention black/gray backsplash tiles and cabinets.

Who puts gray finish on a real wood floor? That sounds crazy.

I assume any non wood color floor that has wood-like markings is vinyl.

So add some color to your home?

> I can't stand it.

So don't do it. This isn't even a mole hill.

Yeah. My brother just built a house and it's grey everything. As a homeowner I do see the logic in not proliferating too many different colors throughout the house but if it were me, I'd definitely have had at least some variety.

There was a famous artist who got brain damage. Afterwards he could only see grayscale.

He also started disliking colors. Couldn't actually see the color but he thought they looked "dirty and weird".

So that's a possible cause for the popularity of gray. Brain damage. Caused by ubiquitous use of antidepressants or bad air or whatever.

Yep, I had to convince my wife to get the orange version of this rug: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01F9NNJA0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

Because I think grey and orange looks cool with our hardwood (and it totally does), and while it took some initial arm twisting, she was sold on it as soon as it arrived as we put it in the room. Our friends meanwhile have a white fetish. Everything that can be white is some shade of white. If they didn't have carpet their house would feel like a hospital and/or wedding, I honestly feel more relaxed in their unfinished basement than their living room

Your rug is also removable. That means even if it's there while the house is for sale some day, the potential buyers will know that it won't be their problem if they don't like the color. Also, I think accent colors are required to make a home look great even if it's a color I don't like, it's better IMHO than all the bland stuff going around.

This, 1000%! I painted the exterior of my home a BRIGHT blue with a BRIGHT yellow door amongst the sea of beige and grey dreariness (I mean we live in Portland, was the 9 months of grey not enough?!). Two of my neighbors detest it based on their passive aggressive comments, but otherwise I get tons of compliments. Every time I arrive home from somewhere, it puts a huge smile on my face seeing those colors light up our street. This beige and grey trend can't die fast enough.

Gray interiors are also optimal for making a neutral space for doing color-sensitive work like photo editing because surrounding colors can taint your perception. My office space is mostly gray with a lot of wood and small accents in earth tones so I don't ruin the atmosphere for anything related to design.

For interiors, you have to be a little careful; bold color walls can end up sucking in light, especially at night. At one point a relative's house had a red bedroom that they described as "the inside of an animal's mouth".

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.

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.

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!

https://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=222

brown and bloom :p

A couple of decades maybe.

The console generation of Xbox 360 / PS3 only ended a decade ago

And the grey/brown games were mostly popular at the start of it and during the end of the previous generation.

I just commented something similar.

Personally I find colour very stimulating. I have to hide my art books otherwises I end up mesmerised by them for hours. I had a bookshelf with a video game collection on it and if I so wondered past it I would get trapped staring at it. Not the individual games but the whole thing in its entirety

I came across a term for this called HSP (highly sensitive person). It seemed pseudo scientific but there is some anecdotal truth to it. I often wonder if watching cartoons as a kid somehow programmed me to be like this or is it some deeper evolutionary trait.

https://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orang...

We are deleting color from our computer user interfaces. First dark mode, and then people started talking about light and dark modes/themes. Well, if dark mode is dark primarily and uses color to make a select few things pop, then what's light mode supposed to be like? Well, if one is intentionally really dark, then the opposite should be...

And now we live in a world of UIs that are either dark grays or some mix of white and light grays, and the older, more middle of the road UI design that wasn't intentionally light or dark is more or less gone.

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."

I assumed it was to make it easier to identify the right battery packs.

Sadly almost all the battery packs are basically black with some accent colors (since they all now have rubberized protection).

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.

> 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?

You're going to love your new shipping crate home!

they re not that colourful either

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.

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.

In the next iteration, toilets will join the open concept

A lot of it is practical. People tend to live differently than a generation ago. How many people today really want a formal dining room that's separated from the kitchen? Or a dedicated formal living room?

A number of years back I had to have some major construction for structural reasons and it ended up opening up much of my ground floor considerable--and it's really so much better.

I'm not saying it all has to be one big fully open floor plan but generally speaking at least kitchen/dining area and maybe other common spaces are more useful as an open plan.

Hmm… I have no need for having both separated formal dining rooms and living rooms, too, but I also don't want the kitchen's smells, fumes and heat entering uncontrolledly into my living room, either.

Minimalism doesn’t imply grayscale. Consider the color fields of the abstract expressionists or In C by John Cage (grayscale would be octaves or perhaps perfect intervals only). Desaturated everything is the aesthetic of contemporary Scandinavian design which is rooted in minimalism. It will go out of vogue eventually.

Most things in the US at least are not designed, they are just built (90% of all houses). Architects aren’t even in the picture.

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/

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

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.

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-s...

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.

> ...it costs more money to dye the plastic...

I'd posit that the real cost is the cost of carrying more inventory. It's cheaper to carry 200 in beige than 100 in each of 10 colours. It means you're less likely to be out of the colour the customer wants and you don't have to track/manage the different options.

Compare with clip on covers for mobile phones. Heaps of colours/design available, but it's not a cost to the manufacturer as they leave all that up to third parties, who are effectively charging extra for the option of colour.

> For one, it costs more money to dye the plastic or paint/anodize the metal.

Ironically, I suspect the reason is exactly the opposite: that colour is now essentially free compared to grey/muted. I certainly don't think people are buying grey carpets, on balance, because it's cheaper.

It used to be that it was difficult to colour things significantly. In the long distant past, you can think of "royal purple" being so expensive that only the real elite have access to it. In early 20th century, that's no longer exactly the case but still I would expect colour fabric is somewhat expensive, so it's still the preserve of a richer class. When it become accessible in the mid 20th century, it becomes popular as people still think of it as being more premium. Finally, another generation comes along that doesn't think of deep colour as being a premium product (because everyone has it) and either rebels or just evaluates it on its actual merit.

None of the above is backed with any actual evidence. But that's certainly how elite clothing has progressed i.e. why world leaders wear grey suits today instead of elaborate coloured gowns.

Yes, and nowadays we associate bright colors more and more with ads screaming at us for attention. This makes these colors feel cheap and tasteless, you don't want to look like an ad

> you can think of "royal purple" being so expensive that only the real elite have access to it.

Depends on the timeframe, those Purple Islands shellfish were juicy at the very beginning, I think got selectively bred (by accident) to have very very little purple. Purple was originally a substance, like cocaine or gold or blue paint. Later got called purple dye. At the beginning there was no other purple anything anywhere (porphyry marble but that's different, and not the same shade, same root though).

Not even the elite, the king and maybe his family too. Elites wore red, Patrician (one of the meanings, it's a double entendre) is those who wore red. During the Republic wearing purple was a death wish. Caesar I think didn't refuse fast enough at one point, something like that. Then during the Empire--I think right away--purple was back. At least in porphyry it was back. I think in clothes and perhaps statue paint? Late Empire it was by far the most expensive substance. Like a pound of silk dyed purple was worth twelve people's lives.

And there were different shades, not like now where it's like what's the RGB hex of that color squirt squirt squirt here it is, #123456, or #abcdef. It's not the real deal.

> 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.

One of my favorite examples of this is the old Red Barn Restaurant chain [1]. The buildings were barn shaped and when they went out of business, they often times were repurposed as something else. They still stick out so much anywhere you come across them and I always am excited to see what business occupies them and how the the juxtaposition between the building and business is. One of my favorites is this one, which is now (or at least was at the time of this street view), a Sushi restaurant:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1006047,-80.743547,3a,75y,21...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barn_(restaurant)

IHOP, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut are the ones I notice the most these days.

Old Blue & White gas stations are a treat to find. Not sure how many are left standing, but I had dinner at one repurposed as a restaurant in Tunica many years ago.

https://blueandwhiterestaurant.com/

I 100% make purchases based on colour. Not just colour but it is very important to me in deciding.

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?

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.

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...)

I had thoughts the same way myself (viz. response to overstimulation) but I'm not even remotely certain how to get hard numbers behind such a thing.

I think you're onto something. I went to pick up my son at the Portland airport last winter. There must have been around 100 people waiting at the baggage claims, and almost all of them were wearing black. The rest were wearing other dark colors. No light or bright colors.

I thought it was weird, but as I stood there wearing my light blue shirt, it occurred to me that I might be the weird one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571

A month ago there was a 200 comment HN thread about the Twitter original OP was based on.

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

Great work, keep tha noggin workin!

The car color graph is very effective, nice work.

(Sauce) https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/j7yfqb/oc_...

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).

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

Here's the Twitter original:

https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976051860963333

Previous HN threads about the Twitter thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261571 (215 comments, 27 days ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246181 (5 comments, 28 days ago)

Not linking to the original is rather sad.

There is a very clear reason for that, and it's in the notes of the post. There is very clear disdain for the twitter user, primarily as he seems to be a 'traditionalist fascist'. On Tumblr, especially, they are not particularly fond of the author in any way.

This post was originally screenshots, but was then rewritten with additional points + additional sources. The idea was to separate out the 'the world was better in the past!' and transform it to a critique/discussion of capitalism.

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.

And the dark is light /s

And Goths :)

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

For what it's worth, I have never once regretted making a bold color choice in my home. I've been using bright orange as a the primary accent color in my kitchen for about fifteen years across four homes and still love it.

Life is too short for fucking beige. Build a space that reflects what you love and if what you love changes, so be it, change your space then. But there's no reason to shortchange yourself now in subservience to a future self you may never become.

I'm no interior designer, but I think it's fun to let decor mutate slowly instead of "redoing the living room". If I see a chair I like, what do I need to change for it to fit in with what I have? I don't know if it's cheaper in the long run, but it does keep things more interesting imo.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

explains why I see white tank tops everywhere

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.

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

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-col...

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

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.

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.

so the dataset is completely bogus or what is your explanation for how this is made-up?

The dataset may not be bogus, but a lot of this fashion / what people like / what people think is good

How would this be confirmation bias?

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's basic organic and maybe advanced inorganic chemistry. The first semester of organic chemistry and probably a higher-level inorganic chemistry course (which is more about where the electrons are than what are the products of reactions). Organic chem is kind of a broad subject but you can start to see why certain patterns have broader absorption spectra and also notice that a lot of azo compounds are pretty toxic.

You can learn organic chemistry from a textbook by just reading and doing every problem in the book. There's also some free online courses and Khan Academy.

I don't think it's easy learn a lot about inorganic chemistry as an autodidact. Teachers are good at emphasizing the important things so that you don't get lost in the weeds.

For reference, you'd be looking at something like MIT's Principles of Inorganic Chemistry I and II (5.03, 5.04) which have organic chemistry I as a prerequisite, which in turn has general chemistry as a prereq.

Then, I imagine, you'd be ready to take on anything in the field of dyes.

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.

npc

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And if you live in a hot place a dark car is a bad idea.

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.

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.

Now we need to figure out the right color for a place that gets both hot and cold.

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.

"Of course you could have it painted after purchase but most people won't bother to."

That's super expensive and low quality compared to paint directly from the factory.

Exactly! So now having a coloured vehicle has just become another symbol of status like a nice watch.

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.

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.

And the purpose of life is, of course, economic efficiency. /s

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/

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.

This reads like vanilla trying to convince the world that it's really the edgy one.

Reads like someone desperately trying to be McLuhan :)

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

Aren't TikTok and all other self-promotion channels not exactly about being noticed, being unique (or rather thinking you're unique) and so on?

People who are self promoting on TikTok often wear garish makeup and clothing that they wouldn't wear on a bet in public. Its performance, and you get to do it "privately" in that no one watches you filming, usually. The public audience and risk of embarrassment is apart from the performance. "singing in the shower".

As one point of anecdata, my wife started doing TikTok videos recently to help promote her books. She puts on make up and wears cute bows in her hair for the videos. She rarely put on makeup and never wore bows in her hair before doing TikTok. And the bows come off as soon as she's done making the videos.

On the other hand I regularly see people in the street shooting videos, assumingly for TikTok judging by the way they act, in rather plain looking clothes. Which I'm now not sure anymore whether it proves any point or not :P

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reminds me of this Reddit post: 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”

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/

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

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 :-).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

https://youtu.be/Dhwcc-iiNJQ

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.

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...

Two countries arent the “world”. 46% is not a majority.

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

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

> Color has been disappearing from the world

... and?

Is that a bad thing for some reason?

This site highjacks the browser's back button.

We get all our color from our screens now.

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.

I like it!

I blame Apple.

Which is ironic considering what they were doing in the 90s with the iMac G3.

and their logo used to be a rainbow apple.

I feel like Cook & Co. have been bringing back the rainbow apple, no?

Apple is far exceeding every other competitor at providing color options.

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

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!

If there's a Firefox plugin to fix that behavior, I'd love to know!

It doesn’t help that some web frameworks make it difficult to preserve the open in new tab behaviour

What modern (last 10 years) web framework makes it difficult to have links be links?

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.

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.

Yeah the one thing I love to do, because hey it is the web, is open navigations in a new tab. For example when banking see my transactions in one tab while making a payment in the second. I hate sites that break that. Banks like to do that presumably for security theatre. NextJS makes it easy to mess up but once you know the trick it is ok - they should probably add a console warning for it.

That's not what the parents are complaining about. It's when the user wants to open a regular link in a new tab using a key modifier.

This is working for me (just tested). Can you share one that isn’t please? I can investigate.

Hey Lee. I'm not saying it doesn't work :)

I'm just saying they are talking about something else.

I just realized you work for Vercel, so how about I try to minimum reproduce then I can raise an Github issue?

That would be very helpful, thank you!

I have put a link to the issue in my HN profile. I think me providing the code will clear up the confusion as to what I think is a problem as we might all be talking about something different.

It has been fixed in the canary version already. Nice.

https://github.com/vercel/next.js/pull/36436

I got into this habit long before I got into tech, I wasn't even conscious of the reason why. You're right, it's extremely frustrating when a website breaks middle-click to open in new tab behavior.

that's why I have thousands of tabs open

Double click or double tap!

Friendly reminder:

“Please don’t complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Being too common now is interesting when it didn't used to be.

The example was included in the guidelines for a reason.

And in any case it’s not at all relevant to an article about color scales.

That's a bullshit guideline. Back button breakage is a crime against usability and we should be as vocal and irritating as possible about it -- especially in a forum that regularly results in changes along the "Why did (insert FAANG) lock my account with no explanation?" front.

Again, this guideline is garbage. Rage against it. Rage against back button breakage.

There should be a guideline against citing the guidelines. I'm guilty of it too, but it's a boring and shitty (and off-topic! it's metadiscussion!) thing to do.

I think this is a worthy cause and something that interests me. But it should have its own place, and not be brought up randomly on some other topic. Perhaps you or someone else could write a post on it and submit it! That would lead to better engagement and a more focused discussion. It would also be in tune with the guidelines- come to think of it, that's probably why the guidelines are as they are.

I appreciate the juicy center of good humor in your comment of rage. Maybe the following will help.

You're right, of course. It's just that there are competing values, so we have to make a tradeoff. One value is usability and having web content be less annoying, intrusive, abusive, and so on. No disagreement there. I think most HN readers share similar feelings about these things; certainly I do.

The other value is curiosity. Curiosity likes new things, different things [0], unexpected things—things it can learn from. It doesn't do so well with repetition [1], indignation, or genericness [2].

These two values conflict because complaints about the former tend to be repetitive, indignant, and generic.

How to decide the conflict? That question actually has a clear answer, because we're trying to optimize for just one thing here, namely intellectual curiosity [3]. So that value has to win.

This is one of those cases where it's super helpful to have just one thing you're optimizing for and to know exactly what it is. It's not that this is the 'right' decision, the 'correct' guideline, or anything like that—it's just correct relative to what we're trying to optimize for.

[0] Diffs are what's interesting https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Thanks for writing that up and taking the time to explain the "optimizing". The moderation approach makes a lot more sense when you consider it as a hill-climbing heuristic along that one particular axis.

> complaints about the former tend to be repetitive, indignant, and generic.

Rest assured that I'll do my best to avoid these in any future complaints about back button breakage!

Send me a link if you come up with a new one ;)

Yes, exactly - it's hill-climbing. Sisyphean optimization, you might call it.

complaining about breaking the guidelines is too common to be interesting. let's add that one in there too.

Feel free to send an e-mail to the moderators and suggest it.

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