Why Is the World Losing Color?

The rise of Chromophobia...

Walk around in the average parking lot, and you’ll find yourself in a sea of black, white, and silver vehicles. Watch Netflix at home or catch a film in the theaters, and you’ll get the same washed-out color grade on either screen. Glance at the logos of the world’s largest companies, and you’ll notice a shrinking palette.

It all points to one thing: color is vanishing from our world.

This isn’t just a hunch. Studies of everything from car paint to consumer objects show that we’re in the midst of a vast aesthetic shift. What used to be vibrant has become sterile. What used to pop out and catch our attention now fades into the background.

The question is — why?

The answer isn’t just about fashion or materials, but is rooted in a much older understanding of the relationship between color and truth.

Here’s why color is disappearing from our world, and what we can do to bring it back…

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A Monochrome World

The colors around us aren’t just changing. They’re disappearing.

According to major auto paint suppliers, more than 80% of new cars are now grayscale. Black, white, gray, and silver dominate the roads. Reds, blues, and greens in auto production are increasingly rare.

It’s not just cars — a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.

Graphic design has followed a similar trend. Streaming platforms, fashion brands, and e-commerce hubs are consistently rebranding in black-and-white. Most recently, HBO’s move to rename its service “Max” was accompanied by a logo redesign that stripped away its original blue — replacing it, of course, with stark white text on a black background.

Even cinema has gone gray. Although Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was shot on vivid, richly colored sets, its final color-grade — like that of many historical dramas — washes out all the colors in a somber, blueish-gray tint. It’s a visual style that has become so ubiquitous that directors like Wes Anderson are often considered “unorthodox” for their use of vibrant color in film.

On the surface, there are some straightforward reasons for this. Industrial materials like steel and plastic, for example, are produced in neutral shades. Grayscale branding for logos is easier to reproduce and scale. Muted palettes are less likely to alienate customers.

But this isn't the whole story. To fully understand why color is disappearing from our world, we have to go further back…

The Philosophers’ Suspicion of Color

Color has always had a strange status in Western philosophy — and more often than not, that status is second-class.

In Chromophobia, art theorist David Batchelor argues that the devaluation of color can be traced to the very birth of Western thought. From Plato onward, color was treated as a distraction: sensory noise that got in the way of rational understanding.

Plato described the world of appearances as a deceptive “prison-house,” i.e., a realm of illusion where truth could only be grasped by looking beyond the senses. Color, tied directly to sensation, was thus something to overcome — not to embrace.

Aristotle echoed the sentiment. In Poetics, he argued that the power of artwork lay in its structure, not its palette:

“A random distribution of the most attractive colors would never yield as much pleasure as a definite image without color.”

For Aristotle, it’s form that holds meaning — not hue.

This view persisted through the Enlightenment, with German philosopher Immanuel Kant arguing that while color may add charm to art, it has no bearing on true aesthetic judgment. In his view, color neither touches reason nor elevates the mind.

The underlying theory in all of these cases is that while color is sensory, unstable, and chaotic, form is rational, stable, and pure. Once you see this bias, you begin to notice how deeply it has shaped the modern world — and how it helps explain our current retreat into colorlessness.

Minimalism, Mass Markets, and Beige Beats

The modernist philosophy developed in the early 20th century helped push Western culture’s underlying suspicion of color to its extreme. For architects like Adolf Loos, color was a kind of primitive indulgence — the enemy of clarity and seriousness.

In his 1910 lecture Ornament and Crime, Loos celebrated a future without decoration or color, where aesthetic purity came from form alone. “We have gone beyond ornament,” he famously declared. “We have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity.”

The legacy of his ideal is everywhere: sterile office parks, concrete apartment blocks, glass-and-steel towers that all look the same. Mass market forces mean that everything from buildings to branding is designed to appeal to everyone — but in doing so, it resonates with no one.

The same impulse is even reshaping music. In the streaming era, songs are engineered to appeal to massive, borderless audiences. The result is a flattening of the sensory experience — from reduced dynamic range (the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of a song) to less “complex” musical elements like a key change. In other words, the musical equivalent of beige walls.

Behind all of this is a belief that to be rational is to suppress the sensory, and that the more universal something is intended to be, the less color it can afford to show.

Brands that want to be taken "seriously" choose muted storefronts — unlike, say, a colorful book or jewelry store with no such ambitions.

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

Towards a Vibrant Future

In today’s world, we often associate vivid color with chaos, childishness, or excess. But history offers plenty of counterexamples — times where color and form worked together to overwhelm, inspire, and elevate.

Baroque art, for example, is full of riotous color. Its churches and canvases explode with golds, reds, blues, and greens. But it doesn't result in chaos. The color is structured, and works within a powerful formal logic that stirs both emotion and intellect. You feel it, and you follow it.

Baroque art stands in direct defiance of the chromophobic worldview. It doesn’t strip down experience in the name of order, but rather builds it up — embracing sensation and structure together.

It also provides a useful reminder that color doesn’t have to mean disorder. It doesn’t have to undermine seriousness. And indeed, the reflex to strip it away may reveal more about our cultural discomfort than our aesthetic taste. For when we mute our surroundings, we risk muting ourselves.

It’s time to bring color back.