Vered Rosen Design: Color of the year 2013

Pantone's Color of the year 2013 - Emerald green

Every year, Pantone, the global authority on color for the design industries (fashion, home, industrial and graphic design), announces it's choice for "Color of the year", and this year it's Emerald green.

Selecting the "Color of the Year" is a very thoughtful process. To arrive at the selection, Pantone quite literally scours the world to look for color influences. These influences come anywhere from the entertainment industry, traveling art collections, hot new artists, popular travel destinations and other influences such as technological advances.

Last year's "color of the year" 2012 was Tangerine.

Did you notice that? I'm sure you did and I did too, but mostly in the fashion industry. Less so in home decor, and it's clear why:

It's easy and fairly cheap to update one's wardrobe with a few items to match the current fashion trends, but it can be quite costly to do so for your home, unless you invest in fairly small and inexpensive items such as pillows, towels and bed linens.

With that thought in mind, I happen to be in crate and barrel this week and immediately noticed they had a new bed linen set, bathroom accessories and towels in emerald green and other blue-green hues. Here's a picture I took of the lovely display at crate and barrel:

Even though emerald green by itself is certainly not my favorite color, I found the combination of emerald green with other blue-green hues extremely pleasing to the eye.

Below is a set of their towels in different shades of green and turquize.

Emerald is a glass like gemstone.

I'm not sure if these beautiful set of glass vases that I found at crate and barrel are inspired by the emerald, but they clearly relate to this glass like gemstone.

Here's another picture I found on pinterest with the same hues. Emerald green is a very pretty color for glass containers.

Even Pantone's inspiration pictures for emerald green include other green hues. This picture is taken from their website:

PANTONE COLOR OF THE YEAR 2013 - Emerald 17-5641

What about the more expensive home decor items? would you buy them in a trendy color?

If a client asked me if they should buy a sofa, chair or install a carpet in emerald green, this will be my advice:

If you always loved emerald green LONG before the folks at Pantone decided this will be the next "color of the year", then go ahead and buy a sofa or a chair in that color, or better yet, paint a room with this color. I would NOT install a carpet or any other fixed element in any trendy color, simply because you might want to sell your house and most likely your potential buyers aren't necessarily in love with emerald green.

Sometimes its easy to fall in love with a trendy color simply because you see it everywhere in the stores, and it's being displayed so beautifully, along with other coordinating colors, under the best possible lighting conditions. But we all know how it feels like when you buy something that has no color relationship with what you already have at home. It just doesn't work.

Bottom line - if you absolutely love greens and blues and you've been living with these colors way before they became trendy, go ahead, take advantage of the fact that there's so much to choose from, and shop til you drop!

Otherwise, if you hate emerald, forget about it, and if you "kind of", like it a little", you can buy yourself a top or a handbag and feel "current".