Why are there no more red cars?

If we look around us, we'll notice that we wear rather dark clothes, that mobile phones and computers are generally gray, that household furniture ranges from brown, black, and white, and that it's hard to find household appliances that aren't white or silver. Where have all the bright red, mint green, vibrant turquoise, or deep orange gone? We live a gray life, as a 2020 study by the UK's Science Museum confirmed. After studying more than 7,000 everyday objects, it highlighted this trend, which has continued to grow to this day.

Since the 19th century, there has been a gradual loss of color, both in variety and intensity. The Industrial Revolution, with the bourgeois man's black tailored suit in keeping with the smoke of the factories and the darkness of the new urban environments, put an end to the aristocratic pastel tones of the Rococo. Industrial production, which simplified products to adapt to the new production paradigm, also brought about a reduction in color. However, despite all this, and due to the rise of plastic as a new material during the 1950s, the explosion of pop art He made intense colors like reds, lilacs, and blues upholster sofas and dye dresses. But at the turn of the millennium, when wood and plastic give way to metal, bright colors will give way to gray, which is completely in tune with the spirit of the high tech of the era. Consequently, while years ago cars were more vibrantly colored, with a clear preference for red, today we drive surrounded by black, gray, and white cars. The same has happened with telephones, which came in a wide variety of colors between the 1960s and 1980s, but over the years they have become much more sober.

But while the adult world has been losing saturation, children's environments have endured as oases where primary colors were generously displayed. But right now, these spaces are also losing the vibrancy that characterized them. beige mumsMothers concerned about their children's color overstimulation have filled their homes with natural wood toys, pine furniture, and clothing ranging in color from beige to brown. These shades are intended to relieve their children of the stress they believe colors cause, in the classist belief that surrounding them with neutral tones will make them better mothers.

Furthermore, the shift in the perception of luxury over the past few decades must also be taken into account. Silent luxury, totally in vogue today, considers that nothing better than restraint and minimalism to display social class. As a counterpoint to this premise, we assume that garish colors are synonymous with low quality, tackiness, mass consumption, and bad taste. Therefore, the logos of luxury brands such as Chanel, Tesla, and Apple have tended to lose saturated colors and have ended up standardized with few clear differences. Sobriety becomes an aspirational status symbol that should be followed to establish a social presence. Even entering any McDonald's fast-food chain, where the clown Ronald McDonald hosted a space exploding with bright colors, has now also succumbed to dark gray as the dominant tone in its restaurant design, in an attempt to shed the idea of fast food.

While this chromatic muting currently only dominates so-called Western countries and predominantly urban environments, it is true that globalization may end up affecting other countries characterized by the use of intense colors, such as India, Mexico or Nigeria, which could become chromatically muted and cause them to lose a cultural element of their own: color.