Pantone names a pastel pink and a baby blue as the hottest colors of 2016

For the first time, the color authority folks at Pantone have apparently picked not just one go-to color for 2016 but two, prognosticating that next year’s retail clothing racks, paint cans and furniture showrooms will be heavy on shades of Rose Quartz and Serenity.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Rose Quartz (color swatch 13-1520,) a just-this-side-of-dusky shade of pink and Serenity (color swatch 15-3919) a click or two darker than baby blue, are set to share the honors for the upcoming year.

Pantone said it would make its formal announcement Thursday morning.

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The tranquil, dialed-down colors themselves aren’t all that surprising -- both were on Pantone’s spring 2016 top-ten fashion color list announced back in September.

What is curious is that Pantone didn’t stick with the script and give us one single color that would reign supreme for 2016.

Oh, we’re sure that once the official announcement is made, the Pantone peeps will have some kind of justification for splitting the color baby.

But because the news comes barely a month after the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund bucked 12 years of tradition to give its top honor to a troika of designers instead of one, and four months after Vanity Fair announced not one but five best-dressed lists, it makes us wonder if the once-popular, authoritarian, top-down, “best-of� kind of lists, and proclamations like this are falling out of fashion.

Is Pantone’s double-dip on the color of the year a smart move, a hedging of bets or something else?

Only time will tell.

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