Pantone Announces 2013 Color of the Year

Pantone announced their 2013 Color of the Year last week. Jewel toned fans will be thrilled with the choice: Emerald, Pantone 17-5641.

Pantone 2013 Emerald

As usual, this selection is one of the colors from the next year's spring color forecast.

According to various web sources, the RGB color code for Emerald is: R 0 G 152 B 116, and the HTML code is #009B77.

Looking at the color choice in the context of the past half dozen choices, we see a continuation of the trend back to darker tones and more saturated colors after a few years of slightly more muted tones.

The selection of Emerald isn't too surprising, given the increasing prevalence of green tones in fashion and home decor. One influence on the rise of the color is that fashion icon Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, is frequently seen in emerald shades of green that complement her dark hair beautifully. A good example is the emerald "Cabbage" dress by British luxury retailer Mulberry that she debuted at a Buckingham Palace party last year and has worn multiple times in the past year.

And Kate's not the only one - the jewel tone has been showing up on red carpets with increasing frequency.

The spring/summer lines that will be shown at CHA Winter 2013 next month will be a great opportunity for a lot of green to show up in the scrapbook industry. There's plenty of it on store shelves right now in the holiday seasonal lines, but limited examples of this shade of green so far showing up in non-holiday lines. This can somewhat be explained of course by the fact that darker tones in general aren't typically considered "scrap friendly" in product design.