I feel like part of the movement towards grayscale is that people are afraid to stand out. I can always easily find my car in a parking lot, because it stands out. People can find me in a group, because I stand out. I'm glad I don't care too much about the opinions of other people, so I just wear what I want to and don't try to blend in. I also feel bad for people who don't wear what they'd like to because they're afraid to stand out, because you only get one lifetime.
I personally also hate that the already dreadful winter is made even more dreadful by everyone wearing dark clothing. Please all buy something colorful to wear next winter... It's safer too!
Abed: "3's and 2's tend to wear neutral colors. Looking like you want to move up can get you moved down..." [Abed waves to people in the distance] "Those are other 3's. We talk about how we're glad we're not 2's." [Abed stands to leave] "Small talk guys... I make small talk now."
I started this back in 2010 as a safety measure when cycling from home to Uni, and rapidly decided I liked it.
I’ve progressively branded myself more and more in bright orange. Funny thing is it isn’t even close to my favourite colour.
My car is “velocity red”. Pity it’s not metallic orange or green or some other more interesting colour, but I certainly don’t care enough to foot the bill to repaint it.
I had a dark gray car many years ago that I wanted to wrap in matte black, but I just never got around to it then ended up selling it.
I have some orange t-shirts that I love, but if I'm going out on a trip to the country to look for wildlife there is no way I'd wear them - I choose muted natural greens and khaki instead (although I don't actually wear camo gear). Also, when I photographing anywhere where I might be partially visible in a window reflection I wear clothes that don't have stripes, because these stand out like a sore thumb.
I'm a man and I've recently started wearing a lot of "Hawaiian" shirts (loud, colorful prints) and I get a lot of compliments on the street. Not sure if it's about the color or about wearing something that reads as a "party" shirt, though.
this thread wasn't talking about fashion choices anyway. the reason for this is totally uninteresting. we're seeing the circumstances of assets like cars and houses being sold to future people and surviving, and the ones that future people by have less of the prior owner's personality to them.
why are new houses so boxy and drab? consider that the brutalist VA building in Chicago and federal building in boston are equally as historically important, if not more so, than your average twee little crumbling victorian in san francisco. but hey, you can demolish the "ugly" buildings and critically, do something fuck all different with the land, than those absolutely destitute sticks buildings. i don't think the economic stories are interesting.
Marketing: When presented with a colorful choice, people will buy the gray/white and neutral palette. We will create a colorful campaign to ignite emotional response.
Business Development: We love this approach. It makes business sense. Go for it.
Psychologist: In the past, people were open-minded and tolerated more artistic and individual choices. Nowadays, every one is in search of the safe zone for social validation and compliance. Big Brands create a culture of subtle colors and people love it.
That's odd, I dress in colourful clothes and I get positive comments both from people who are themselves dressed in bright colours and from people very drably dressed. Perhaps it differs from place to place.
I think there is a small minority of people that either want attention, or don't mind it.
The rest of the world wants to avoid drawing attention to themselves. This is true for both positive and negative attention. I don't think it's so much about what others think, I think it's just that attention is uncomfortable for most people, and they do what they can to blend in as to avoid drawing attention and feeling uncomfortable.
If the world were more colorful, this may mean not wearing neutral colors, as this would now stand out and likely draw attention.
But yeah, people are afraid of standing out. Once a friend told me he'd love to do the same, but he did not have the guts to do it, so he keeps wearing dim clothes.
One day there was a case of mistaken identity when there was one other person at the resort with an orange cap.
Not neon pink or anything. Just regular 70s orange.
After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.
People would go crazy over a red or white ThinkPad in focus groups, but would never buy one because they couldn't see themselves as "that person" with the red laptop at a meeting.
Lenovo did make both a red and white x100e a long while ago, but those were more like netbooks.
It adds up too. Companies like Apple have long advertised with a diverse range of colors for their devices, but I think most people settle on black / white in the end because it's more neutral / doesn't stand out.
At some point people had trouble distinguishing their grey macbook pro from the hundred other macbook pros. First that was resolved with full size sticker and covers (which were cute in that they used the illuminated apple logo on the back as a feature), then with... a very wild and colorful range of stickers they save up from conferences and the like.
It was an interesting thing to witness, having big groups of people with bland, uniform, sleek and neutral, to a very nerdy form of self-expression and standing out from the crowd.
palate / palette / pallet Your “palate” is the roof of your mouth, and by extension, your sense of taste. A “palette” is the flat board an artist mixes paint on (or by extension, a range of colors). A “pallet” is either a bed (now rare) or a flat platform onto which goods are loaded.
I don't understand that argument. My toaster only needs to work in my kitchen, not every kitchen.
From a manufacture's point of view I get it. It is cheaper to produce 3 colors than 54.
But they were in the past? I don't know but I wonder why this might have changed.
Lime green is nice when it is short lived, but lime green isn't as nice in year 25, after your tastes have changed.
Hot pink is very eye catching, so it got the votes. On the other hand hot pink is very eye catching, who wants their toaster to be the center of attention?
The world is for all real purposes has been gobbled up by the Anglosphere. It's all but dead; I'm sure many people realize how drab and low-entropy our world is today.
It's also rather Anglocentric to assume that the "generic world" you describe is an "Anglosphere". Today's modern aesthetic is often described as Japanese/Zen or Scandinavian, and indeed, its biggest purveyors -- IKEA, Muji, Uniqlo, H&M -- are not from the Anglosphere.
I'm guessing it has to do with the position of the sun relative to the earth / how sunlight enters the earths atmosphere.
Just seeing these more vibrant colors have the effect of lifting my mood a bit.
Just last week I heard somewhere that colors in New Zealand are very vibrant as well. I've never been there, so not sure how it compares to Thailand, but perhaps it's true.
It's because those who need the buildings want them cheaply, and aren't considering an aesthetic factor.
I did a self-build on a house in 2021 and the county planners insisted I had to make the house blend in with the existing ones. There was no room for creativity.
For an age we're we've made progress in personal freedoms we seem pretty hell-bent on forcing conformity.
I live in an apartment that's about a century old, the style of which was widely (but not universally) replicated all over the industrialised world around that time. The view out tall my office window has some other apartment towers in a different and more recent style, perhaps 50 years old, and some short ones in yet another style that might be less than 10 years old.
I suspect that if everything looks the same to you, what you're seeing is the last time a place had major economic growth leading to a building boom.
When it comes to world models, I've met an anarcho-capitalist and an anarcho-communist, and I've known someone who thinks the best thing about democracy is preventing(!) people from getting what they want, and multiple people who want to end technological growth to let the ecosystem (they use the word "planet") heal, and at least one other who would gladly disassemble the actual planet to build a swarm of O'Neill cylinders to power a colonising swarm of von Neumann replicators to do the same to every star in our future light cone. My mother had anecdotes about relatives causing scandals by marrying outside their denominations of Christianity, I've known at the least atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, at least one literal Satanist, and Wiccans (and probably some more but it hasn't come up in conversation).
Sunlight, candle-light and resistive filament lights (incandescent) have a broadband spectrum. Through most of history we've viewed the world lit by these sources.
Moving to fluorescent lights causes spectral quantisation as the frequencies are due to electronic band transitions in the gas. The phosphor absorbs and re-emits energy in different bands that fills out the spectrum but it's still really strange, with missing bits. When fluorescent lights first became popular people complained of headaches from the strange spectrum. They are disfavoured in certain industrial applications because they make some colours harder to see.
Semiconductor lighting is even worse in this regard. Radiative re-emission in valance holes emits line spectrums. Only by combining these do we trick the eye into seeing "white light". Recently we've got good at blending doping agents to give mixed spectrums that approximate daylight.
If these forms of electronic lighting have holes in their spectra, perhaps that's why an analysis of a corpus of photos shows a change in spectrum over time?
Vast majority of white LEDs are phosphor based and not color-mixing
Are you talking about single-colour LEDs? Since white LEDs use a "phosphor", just like fluorescent lights, that convert blue or UV light. In fact I thought that the phosphors used by LEDs today are much better than those used by fluorescent lights.
Maybe you're talking about RGB lights, which combine separate reg, green and blue LEDs so that the colour mix can be changed. But even then I thought, unlike lasers, LEDs are not using single frequencies but relatively wide bands (but will still leave gaps between the red, green and blue colours).
Wow. I didn't know that. So I guess the junction actually emits UV which is converted to visible spectrum? Does that mean they're bad for your eyes if some UV leaks out?
How I thought it worked is that different doping materials are blended in the junction to get a mix of frequencies. Maybe that's impossible.
And yes, sure for RGB clusters the spacing is obvious even to my eyes.
And trust me, it would be much better with LEDs though obviously not perfect. Sometimes the colors just aren't different enough to easily tell apart. It seems like an issue that should be fixed.
Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white.
(I read somewhere [so take this with a grain of salt] that this effect happens with marble kitchen countertops: not that many homeowners actually like them, but they believe that potential buyers might, so an overproportional amount of people put them in their kitchens - leading everybody else to believe that they're actually very popular.)
They are really confused and in disbelief when I tell them that no, it was intentional.
The advantage (other than me just liking fancier colors and disliking the prevalence of grey in cars) is that I can find my car in even the largest parking lot from very far away, and that people instantly recognize me as it's seemingly the only yellow Mercedes-Benz in the town where I live (~100.000 inhabitants) ;-)
Recently I overheard two kids (a boy and a girl, around 7 or so) who drove by my car on bicycles, loudly proclaiming "I would never drive a yellow Mercedes". I wanted to ask them why, but they were too quick (and probably embarassed that I overheard them). I would really love to know if it was their own (genuuine) dislike of the color yellow, or if it was something they acquired from their parents or something like that.
There's definitely location/cultural variety here, people would worry a white car wouldn't sell, due to the increased visibility of dirt and scratches, so only gets 5% of sales here. The top colours here are silver (24%), black (22%) and blue (17%, mostly darker shades).
I'm not sure why silver cars escape the stigma of white cars here since they have the same issues, but they do.
After the size of vehicles and number of pickups, the amount of white cars was the next thing that stood out to me about the cars when I first went to california
Have to also add; if self-driving cars saved everyone from gawker blocks and other annoyances that'd be a net gain for nearly never driving again, at least in more highly regulated areas (presumably interstates and highways first).
> Percentage of Pixels across all photos
Does anybody have a citation for "this study" ?
It's implicitly implied that it comes from some mega cloud storage of personal and professional photos, but it'd be nice to see the actual source and read the methodoloy.
ADDENDUM: Found it.
https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
> This article analyses a selection of the Science Museum Group Collection. We examined over 7,000 photographs of objects from 21 categories. The categories were selected on the basis that they contained large numbers of everyday or familiar objects. These categories range from photographic technology to time measurement, lighting to printing and writing, and domestic appliances to navigation.
Hmmmmm.
That site didn't look at clothes, furniture, and walls, that I imagine saw the largest changes.
(Aside: I live in Victoria, down in the south east of Australia, and foliage colours are generally fairly muted. I’ve been in Darwin once, up in the northern tropical parts of Australia, and found it really weird to see eucalypts and such that clearly felt Australian to my eyes, but in the vibrant tropical greens that I associated (from experience) with Sri Lanka and parts of India.)
1. White as a car color is much more practical in any place that gets a lot of direct sun. In e.g. South Africa you might drive around all day and not see anything except white cars. In Western and Southern Europe their popularity is a rough approximation of summer heat and sunlight in the area.
2. These photographs are by-and-large leaving ignoring practicalities. Sure, a natural wooden wall is nice, but it also needs more maintenance to look like that than one that's painted white.
3. For kitchens boring colors are practically synonymous with an increase in durability and the ability to withstand water. It's easy to get stainless steel, or a white and black marble countertop, you can't paint stainless steel and still place a hot pan on it, a wooden countertop is going to be subject to rot over time, particularly with water ingress. Once you pick stainless steel or white/black for major surfaces others tend to follow.
Companies often choose white cars as well for their fleets: you can easily put a big company logo on a white car - and it will probably look good.
I bet lots of people would choose different colors, if this didnt require to pay additional 1000-2000 dollars. (Also again practicality comes to mind: if you buy a car in an uncommon color you will have problems to get spare parts). This additional fee might be not much for a software developer from Silicon Valley who earns 300k per year, but is a big thing for most of the world.
As far as I know, when you want a non-standard color, for many cars it is cheaper to partially disassemble the body and wrap it in those plastic stickers than to ask the factory to paint it (not to mention that it will take few months before you get your car delivered, why you probably want it now). Only a small section of people does this though.
I bet if the prices of uncommon colors were lower, one could see much more unusual cars.
In fact in some ways the manufacturers are the ones who set the palette (probably based on market research), some colors come in unusual colors straight from the factory. So you 'have' to choose the fancy color, since the car does not come in boring ones. Or at least the unusual color is cheaper (few hundred dollars -> still a lot for many people). For example every now and often a manufacturer comes out with some variant of orange, or orange-red: https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2021/12/orange-cars-you-...
In many ways car color is an illusion of choice: if you dont want to pay 2k dollars and wait few months, you have to take one of the boring colors that are available on the lot for you -> and those 'boring' were selected by the manufacturers, since their market research showed that they will sell. Tons of people cant afford to pay more to have a car that looks different. But judging by the amount of stickers you see on cars, perhaps they would.
Of course customers can order customized cars, but the dealership will always prefer to sell the stock that they have on hand. So while special ordering a colorful car might be only slightly more expensive than special ordering a white car, special ordering anything for any reason will loose you all negotiating power and cost you thousands of dollars in the final price. I might want a colorful car, but I don't want to pay that much more for a colorful car, so I settle for white.
If you paint your house hot pink, you're probably not concerned about resale value for a long while.
Also color fades more noticeably adding to upkeep cost. This is my two cents.
‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.’
I cannot say that any one agreed with me. The selling people could not of course see the advantages that a single model would bring about in production. More than that, they did not particularly care.”
Henry Ford in collaboration with Samuel Crowther in My Life and Work. 1922. Page 72
Beside, color is all in your mind. Out of it, it's just electromagnetic waves.
No it isn't. Our eyes are sensitive enough to detect differences in the wavelengths. Would you say AM/FM radio waves exist only in our mind? No, they have real world impacts, just like color does.
You're tweaking the analogy.
I didn't wrote 'electromagnetic waves exist only in our mind'. I wrote the qualia 'color' exists in the mind as the highly processed result of the activity of certain complicated structures in space-time. Some carriers of these structures, that is some humans that are convinced the idea of science is reasonable, like to call these structures brains. So a lot of people on this planet, but by far not all. Others call them 'soul' or whatever is the currently most useful and hardest to disprove in their environment.
The electromagnetic waves that trigger certain sensors in the eyes and trigger that processing are outside those brains. Or at least those brains assume they are. Assume with more or less good reason. But to complicate the thought, that is an assumption. That is, an element of the mind.
But anyone in their right mind should back away from the abyss of solipsism now, right?
>>Our eyes are sensitive enough to detect differences in the wavelengths So you are not seeing colors, but differences in wave lengths? That maybe, but most of us do see 'colors', that is a subjective perception? Do you see a red rose or a '620 to 750 nm' rose?
Sorry, but I just love to ask people, what is 'red'? Just describe it, can't be that hard.
It's like saying that food is just nutrients, or sound/music just vibrations. Color is an experience.
And where is your experience outside your mind? Whatever they are, where are qualia outside the model of your world? Where is your pain whe you get beaten up?
"On Tuesday morning, Instagram head Adam Mosseri appeared in full damage control mode. Facing the camera and wearing a bright yellow sweater, he attempted to quash a growing revolt from some of Instagram’s most prominent users."
Why even mention the color of the sweater? I can see that clearly on the video.
In this specific case though, is conveying the color of the sweater to people who can't or don't watch the video important? Why mention the color of his sweater, but not the color of his eyes, his hairstyle, or any of countless other unrelated visual details?
Trying to put myself in the shoes of someone using a screen reader, maybe these little details give some extra context which, while irrelevant to the topic, help to give "color" to the story which I, as a person who is able to watch the video, am taking for granted?
The Ford Focus pioneered a new 'silver' paint that was formulated differently to 'silver' paints that had gone on before. 'Silver' was no longer an expensive option, the base model had it. This proved popular and the trend was set, silver cars took over at the start of the century, using the new formula paint.
An example of regulatory change is food. In the 70's food coloring additives packed a vibrant punch. Decades later with many regulatory changes, those hot pink biscuits are now pinky grey. The palette has been toned down.
Although we have came a long way, many colours rely on elements that are quite toxic. We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt? Take those out on the same basis and things get grey.
Here's some of the dreamlike prose with which they describe their attempt to capture the zeitgeist with a particular shade of blue [2]:
"Transition, evolution, and moving forward will continue to define the world and its population as 2022 emerges. Questions of trust and truth have been debated with many answered, but still more to come. Color Marketing Group’s North America 2022 Key Color, New Day, is the color response for a time still in transition.
"New Day suggests confidence and familiarity to greet 2022 with a sense of comfort. A light, fresh blue with red influences, New Day is an inspiring color designed to convey the classic connotation of hope and new beginnings.
"Whether a phone cover, hairdryer, or polo shirt, fashion and personal items are set to embrace New Day as a color equalizer. New Day presents a color that is not only new but suggests familiarity and ease. Genderless and ageless, it is a hue to blend with others, as well as allowing it to stand on its own."
[1] https://colormarketing.org/about
[2] https://colormarketing.org/2020/11/20/key-color-new-day/
Last time I brought an oil palette and looked at the paints composition, the most toxic thing I could find was copper. And it was as colorful as any oil palette.
From what I understand you can get many things out of crude oil but you can't just rearrange a few hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms to get any colour in the sRGB colour space. So what is the science of safe paints? Got to know now.
The headline graphic is from https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... which really tells us about the colour of a subset of objects in the Science Museum's collection – so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials.
There does seem to be maybe 20% more neutral-coloured cars since 1990, though. Interior design is probably the thing I'd most readily say has become more muted in my lifetime. I guess I'd say the world has become less saturated rather than less colourful.
Yes, the wood telegraph in the article is a good example of this. Because of wood’s texture, it contains a bunch of colors from red to yellow when you look at it at the pixel level. It’s more colorful than an iPhone, but the variety of pixels alone gives the impression that it’s more colorful than it is.
Also, in the same way US legislation killed the station wagon and created the SUV, the latest CAFE standards are creating many boring to drive automobiles.
Most of our furniture and walls are white, gray/stainless steel or black, and variations from it. Yet, we use color accents in most rooms, e.g. orange towels in the bathroom, or lilac bedclothes. So while our place confirms the overall trend, it does not support the conclusion, as it looks much more colorful than my parent's place, which resembles some of the pictures in that thread.
Another important aspect is that the color I like today is not the color I like tomorrow, so buying something with muted colors makes sense, especially for long-lived things like cars or kitchen interiors. It is much easier to change the color accents in a kitchen if you happen to fancy a redecoration that way.
And last but not least, it's easier to sell stuff like cars if it is not very colorful.
This is a pretty big one. Every time I look at buying something colored, I really need to think hard about it. I like the color now, but later I may not. And I'm not going to replace something that isn't broken just because I no longer like the color.
There's also a matter of getting things to match. You're basically stuck with your original color choices going forward unless you're okay with a busy set of clashing colors everywhere.
It is difficult to use a lot of color and be 'tasteful' it is a lot easier to use neutral colors even if the end result is dull. People are too afraid of being tacky so they stay in the nordic ikea safe zone.
Until colour photography, humans didn’t really have a fixed shared anchor as to what the world looks like in general—including colours. All we had was words and paintings.
With consumer colour photography, suddenly it seems as if we have that anchor…
Except it’s not actually the case. Discarding the fact that our perception of colours and shapes is highly idiosyncratic and happens over time (never as a discrete standalone moment), there’s no medium that’s even remotely close to being capable of reproducing the vast dynamic ranges of scene-referred light values at exposure time (and in case of JPEG or film photography, that data is never available in the first place). What can be conveyed is the tiny range reproducible by screens, film or ink on paper—and unless you take charge of scene data interpretation with your favourite raw processing software, the conversion to that range is a result of camera or film manufacturer’s design.
…But even though there’s no true anchor, thinking your phone’s interpretation of reality is just that may be enough for this to be a self-fulfilling prophecy—after all, perception is a socio-psychological phenomenon. We may have used to have our own individual truths, but now it’s very common to believe that bland, sRGB-safe default capture interpretation by our camera or phone is the objective reality of what the world looks like (and anything else must be disclosed as “enhancement” or “processing”)—and it’s not easy for an individual to get rid of that notion if everyone around believes in it.
Even the author of tweets like this runs with the same fallacy, and appears to showcase film and digital captures (and even 3D renders?) side by side, even while those are artifacts of drastically different ways of interpreting scene data.
If by "painting" you also mean things like lithographs[1] and magic lantern[2] shows and glazed ceramics and dyes used in textiles and rugs, then sure, all we had were words and paintings. I don't think most people would think of those when they thinking "paintings," though. And those are only the human-produced color anchors.
(Not to say that smartphones pictures are bad pictures, but to say that ease of taking pictures, and ease of publishing pictures, removes bariers to 'bad' pictures. Smartphones are probably also responsible for an absolute increase in the total number of good pictures)
We shed our colors because we lost the emotions expressed by those colors in our lexicon. We don’t put joy, awe, wonder, or whimsy on display. Those emotions aren’t just gone from our palette (walls, furniture, consumer products, cars, fridges), they are non-existent in and of themselves in society at large. Our Art is outrage, performative or otherwise. News is outrage. Media is outrage. Popular culture is outrage. If you aren’t outraged yourself, you are part of the problem (needs more (out)rage).
We will return to playful objects, playful colors and forms when it is once again permissible to express playfulness. We will return to joyous colors that express joy for joy’s sake when we have joy to express… see also the revival of mid-century modern as an implicit revival of the optimism of the 50s.
[1] <https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/351621.Chromophobia>
* Older photos had more saturation
* Colour photography and screens were new and a novelty, so it was pushed more to showcase their tech's capabilities
* Muted or monochrome colours by companies became the norm and associated with class (e.g., old rainbow apple logo vs newer monochrome logos), too much colour may be seen as kitschy
* Perhaps tied to the postmodern era as a differentiator, bright vibrant colours on products are seen as retro and/or cheap
* Also maybe tied to capitalism, vehicles, houses etc. with safe colours are better when it comes time to sell. I believe mass production would also result in more neutral colours
* With the ubiquity of cameras, more images of banal environments exist now
And I mean annoyingly forced things that should never be that color.
Example: the other day I saw some youtube video of upcoming videogames and many of them have, somehow, parts of purple smoke in fire explosions, the engine exhaust of the Millenium Falcon going from its classic light blue to purplish, lights and shadows that do not match the natural environment forced to subtle purplish.
Not to mention the mandatory login screen of macOS Monterrey.
I’m sure a lot of us can recall something similar in more recent niches like UI design. After a period of excitement with all the new possibilities comes a more sober minimalistic function-first approach.
I don’t think this is something to lament - color has become cheap and widely available so it has lost the meaning it had in the 60’s and earlier. If anything, we could be talking about a brief color-heavy time period that is just ending. One in which everything became unreasonably colorful thanks to unrestrained consumption and petro-chemical innovations.
I myself have anecdotical accounts of this. It couples with decreasing personalization. Today even the desktop picture is seldom changed by the end user.
I hate it.
I'll take a 50s grandma's house any day over the cookie-cutter machined greyscale apartments I see everywhere today.
It's kind of like going to get ice cream and having them put every topping on it. Gummy bears and mint chocolate chips taste good on their own and in various combinations with other things. Not so much when they are together.
As a designer I'm probably more sensitive when it comes to color though.
All my displays are greyscale, and when I turn off the color filter I feel like I’m looking at a trash bin full of neon candy. My short term memory suffers (my theory is that I use color as a mnemonic for thinking, and in the mind: re-coloring is more demanding then coloring, and un-coloring seems impossible, given a complex virtual interface).
Maybe there’s a kind of color-based sensory exhaustion going on from an over-use of color for brand-related messaging and UI, which is subconsciously or unconsciously compensated by reducing the color of everyday objects.
My pet theory is that car colors tend to reflect society's mood, and we've been in a dour one for some time.
There's something to be said for a world which doesn't use colors except functionally.
* A red thing is red because it needs to be seen, like a STOP sign.
* A grey thing is grey because there's no need for it to be not grey.
I'm fine with either a creative colorful world or a functionally colorful world. Most of my stuff is grey. My glasses are purple, because it serves my interests right now for my face to be memorable.
In an urban survival situation, say, I'd want the reverse: "be the grey man" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcNWAgdQoaw)
I'm close to 40 and everyone I know in my age group, where I grew up... their parents all had the same type of furniture with the same wood types. We all had the same colors in our kids' bedrooms. It was three types of local wood, and the odd outlier.
Surprise! When we grew up we didn't want our apartments to look like our parents set them up in the 80s or 90s. My living room is (faux) dark cherry, my bedframe + nightstands are (painted) dark wood, my kitchen is light beige.
Also, utility and convinience are much more increased with neutral colours. Clothes are easier to match, replace, wear again. Cars and appliances are easier to resell.
I believe this trend was primarily driven by economies of scale, and over time it turned into a customer preference by the offer vs. demand paradox.
The thing about fashion though is that it's subconscious. You would not know it affected you unless you are very meta-cognizant in this particular way. ( Which people should educate and train themselves about subtle cognitive biases.)
Regarding cars however, this is likely due to costs of colorful paint as scale.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...
No. I think we’re living in a more colorful world because color is cheap.
(I still like black cars, though.)
