2023 July Color Alert®

Livin’ La Barbie Vida Loca!

Empowered • New Wellness • Phygital Color • Spiritual • Bold

If ever there was a time for bright pink to emerge back onto the design scene, it is now. With the soon to premiere “Barbie” film, the iconic signature color is appearing everywhere and bringing with it a world of plastic fantastic. So far, the film only hints through trailers, but one thing is for sure, its color message is powerful, bright, celebratory, and ready to blast through the year.

Though not the exact value of the famous doll’s signature hue, Nascent is still the embodiment of what pink can represent. With a nuance of blue, Nascent appeared in the research for 2023 emergence in two CMG regions, Latin America and North America. Not quite fluorescent, it is a high chroma pink that glows of its own accord. It is not cheap or frivolous, rather it is taking itself seriously as it connotes the light of self, and that of virtual and artificial realities, representing positive vibrations in real-life and meta-life. Nascent is a color that aligns the psyche, mind, body and spirit with digital therapeutics and suggests the ever reblooming of life’s many stages.

In those respects, it is very much like the film heroine’s life choices, ready to take on anything, representing the power to do so, and ultimately achieving great goals. Whether astronaut, doctor, President, or scientist, Barbie and her pink have the power to succeed.

For design, Nascent is appearing in all manner of product and design, and though originally from Latin and North American discussions, is already becoming a global color, expanding as the year progresses. Consumer electronics will connect physical and digital worlds and that “phygital” landscape is going to be well suited to be awash in the pink of Nascent. Home decor and textiles are just the beginning as this pink transfers its energy from residential to commercial spaces and will be anything from tabletop to immersive rooms.

Of course, Nascent is appearing in fashion, as well. As a color for modern times, it upends gender definitions, defies age, and can be dressy or casual, a moment of color surprise or a full on look. Even the automotive industry has embraced pink, with some fun on-the-road tie-ins to the film, and, why not? In a parking lot landscape of grey, silver, and black, it’s time to make a rolling statement.

Pink often hovers on the side of design, making an exciting appearance before retreating against other hues, but for 2023, the pink of Nascent stands proud and bold as a color for the times and for product design.

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