“Cloud Dancer”
Confirmation bias or...
Dec 9, 2025
Pantone recently announced the 2026 color of the year as “Cloud Dancer”.
I love everything about this.
It’s obvious why the color’s name delights me. Yet it’s so much more than that. Like great art, the real story lies in the creative process behind it and the way people respond to it.
The color is chosen by a global team of experts who conduct research over the course of an entire year to determine collective mood, values, and cultural undercurrents. The team first narrows it down to a single color family, then gets progressively more specific until they arrive at the final hue with a distinct name. It’s an anthropological-style creative process that distills observations of human sentiment across various fields and industries into a single color. The color conveys insights while also signaling the future.
If they announced the color with no context, Cloud Dancer would, to most eyes, be ‘white-ish’. But they don’t. Like an artist’s statement, they present the color with language, nuance, and symbolism.
Pantone Color of the Year 2026, PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer, a lofty white that serves as a symbol of calming influence in a society rediscovering the value of quiet reflection. Imbued with serenity, Cloud Dancer encourages true relaxation and focus, allowing the mind to wander and creativity to breathe, making room for innovation.
Laurie Pressman, the Pantone Color Institute’s vice president, says this: “Similar to a blank canvas, Cloud Dancer signifies our desire for a fresh start,” and “opens up space for creativity, allowing our imagination to drift so that new insights and bold ideas can emerge and take shape.” She goes on to explain that the color also hints at “our search for balance between our digital future and our primal need for human connection.”
Two key premises of my work with Dance at the Intersection are precisely that: that dance connects us to our humanity and that we must embody our creativity to shape the future we want to see. (See my piece, “A Reimagining”)
Here is where the second part of the story comes into play - people’s response.
After spending some time reading responses to the color choice, I find the backlash to be comically ironic. If you don’t like the world as it is, this is a prompt—an invitation—to imagine it otherwise. Like influential art, the 2026 Color of the Year is giving us a reference point for reflection, challenging us to look inward, and then offering our imagination the opportunity to go wild.
So is it confirmation bias, or is Cloud Dancer a signal that creativity and embodiment are unmistakably at the intersection of our collective future?
It doesn’t matter.
I see the blank canvas, and I accept the invitation.