Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Pantone (the Color Conspiracy)

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

What does it mean for a color to be official? This week, Amanda is joined by lexicographer and writer Kory Stamper (@harmless_drudge) to dive into the oddly powerful world of Pantone, the company that turned color into a global authority system complete with sacred swatches, cryptic numbers, and an annual prophecy known as Color of the Year. They unpack how Pantone became the high priest of hue, shaping everything from fashion runways to corporate branding. Why does the word cognac feel more chic than brown? And how did a company convince the world that a very specific white or millennial pink can define an entire cultural moment? Is Pantone simply helping us speak the same visual language… or are we all just obedient followers of the color industrial complex? Either way, pass the swatch book. Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube!Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles, @imanharirikia.  Come see Sounds Like A Cult LIVE at The Bell House in New York on April 21st! Tickets at amandamontell.com/events Thank you to our sponsors! For free shipping and 365-day returns, go to https://Quince.com/slac  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Was it a cult leader or was it a Pantone press release? All right, let's do it. The first quote goes like this. Choosing rest and consciously stepping away from relentless demands and turning inward recognizes that true strength lies not just in doing, but also in being. Pantone. Correct. Anytime I read a Pantone.

press release. I'm always reminded of a quote. The head of their color marketing service, Leotris Isman, said, remember that what we're selling is not necessarily a color. We're selling a feeling. What you want is to connect with the feeling. You want people to see this brown. It's luxurious. It's a sense of coziness and well-being. And you're painting a whole tableau. Your world building. Yeah, absolutely. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. Think less Jonestown and the Mansons and more Swifties, marching bands, in cells, or even just people who are a little too obsessed with astrology.

I'm your host Amanda Montel, author of the book's cultish, word slut, and the Age of Magical Overthinking now out in paperback. Every week on this show, we analyze a different fanatical fringe group from the cultural zeitgeist to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? And if so, which of our three cult categories does it fall into? A live your life, a watcher back, or get the fuck out. Because the thing is, we happen to be living through what I believe to be the cultiest era on record.

But weird groupthink and rituals and full-blown exploitation don't always look like the stereotypical compound in the woods that you might imagine. The word cult can apply to corporate culture, to fitness culture, even to colors. This podcast is here to bring a cheeky tone to the more serious pursuit. of determining which culty groups of the 21st century are healthy, which are toxic, and which are somewhere in between. Today's subject is kind of niche, admittedly, but I hope you'll find it as intriguing as I did. We're talking about a company that claims to be, and I quote, the global authority for color communication and inspiration. Yes, my culties, we're talking about pantone. Not pantine. Not talking about shampoo. We're talking about pantone. As in pantone color of the

year? Have you heard of it? Admittedly, before researching this episode, I wasn't even really 100% sure what kind of company Pantone was or what exactly they did. I just knew it felt culty. Pretty much, Pantone is a color standardizing system that allegedly invents and predicts the whole world's visual identity. And for a pretty penny, all using pretentious, elitist color names like Opac Couchet. Does that mean anything to you? Now, Pantone might not necessarily sound like the type of company that would encounter culty controversy, but it is. Critics have accused Pantone of being a bullshit monopoly that holds colors hostage and wields an undue level of control over something that should be universal. And all this becomes especially problematic considering scandals like

certain toneless, the irony, color of the year choices, including literally period blood one year, not a joke, as well as 2026's cloud dancer, which was just white and drew accusations of rage bait and or eugenics messaging a la Siddney's American Eagle ad. And if those references are too extremely online for you, bless you, and we will catch you up, don't worry. As we tend to analyze on this show, cults tend to have any number of core ingredients, an authority that claims special knowledge, a language outsiders don't quite understand, ritualistic events everyone waits for, and a product you must buy into to fully belong.

We cover cult brands kind of all the time on sounds like a cult, Trader Joe's, Costco, Glossier, but perhaps none have quite the level of mystique and secret cultural influence that Pantone does. This week we're asking, is Pantone operating less like a brand and more like a belief system? And how did it convince so many people to wind up tithing $800 for the privilege of naming pink?

Okay, to help us analyze the cult of Pantone today, we're joined by Corey Stamper, an author and lexicographer whose latest book, true color, explores the history, and dare I say, the theology of the language of color. Corey, welcome to Sounds Like a Colt. Thanks so much for having me. I have been a long time fan of your work. I devoured word by word, which is your first book when I was researching my first book word slut and I was like, oh, we are such kindred spirits. But for those who don't know, could you introduce yourself in your work and your new book? Of course. So my name's Corey. I'm a lexicographer.

that's a writer of dictionaries. I've been writing dictionaries in some form for almost 30 years, which means that I spend a whole lot of time looking at language, how we use language, how we're told not to use language, how language actually works. And my first book was about dictionaries. And this book, True Color, is also kind of about dictionaries, but it's specifically about how we came to define color terms and think of color and how color like language. And how color like language kind of defies a whole bunch of ways to categorize it. So that's what true color is about. And that's what I'm about.

It speaks to my nerdy little soul and also my culty little soul. And with that, I wanted to ask you, when I say the cult of pantone, what immediately comes to mind as someone who's researched to this hallowed institution? I think immediately of two things. I think of the color of the year, which we think of the. the color of the year, kind of the way that if you're aware of the word of the year, you think of the word of the year, like this is capturing the zeitgeist, this is setting us up for the next year. It's summarizing where we've come, where we're going. So I think of the color of the year, which is,

that's when people think of pantone. And I also think of, and this is because of my own history as an editor when you're working in production, I just remember being a baby editor having to check color. against these giant fans of chips that were designers chips from Pantone. And the way that designers would talk about these ships, like, look, these cost $900, do not lose them, do not mark on them. You are just checking to make sure that the color is accurate on the galley. And then hand it back to me, cradled in your hands like the softest, tiniest baby. And I'm not a designer.

So I was just like, what? It's just a whole bunch of chips. But getting to know these giant color decks and just people. obsession about which deck do you have? Do you have this deck? Do you have that year's deck? Do you have this expansion deck? It's a language unto itself. And that's what I think of when I think of the cult of Pantone. A hundred percent. There is so much, even just like language and product on the Pantone website that I can't believe people have such reverence for. Like that's really what makes it sound like a cult. And I think what makes it worthy of analysis on the show to me is that like

Even at the outskirts, from the little bit that I saw before I delved into this episode, I was just like, how does anyone worship this little cup with like a stupid swatch on it that says, like, elephants tears? Like, who cares? But somehow they've like whipped their flock up into the state of frenzy. And I had to understand it. Oh, yeah. In 2017, I think.

I went to my very first color conference. And a lot of the swag was pantone swag, color of the year swag. And it was like people disliked. send it. And these are color professionals, right? So these are people who have lots of different options for color. But everyone was like, oh, I think the color of the year was ultraviolet. And they had like jump drives that were in the shape of swatches. And people are just grabbing like, oh, it's the new Pantone stuff. There's something about not just the color system, which we can talk about Pantone's not the only color system out there. But it's the way that Pantone has marketed themselves and

place themselves as sort of the arbiters of color in design and in the public consciousness that I don't know that they set out to make themselves a little cults, little following, but they definitely have it for sure. Totally. So let's kind of dive into some of the origin story of Pantone in order to understand how exactly it developed this chokehold on the market. So the Church of Color that is Pantone was born in the 1950s, 60s, really the 60s, as I understand it. Basically back then, designers had no way to reliably communicate color. For example, in order to get on the same page as far as like shades and hues and in order to manufacture things, they had to mail pieces of fabric and be like, can you match this?

The former Pantone president Richard Herbert described it as saying, like, oh yeah, our famous thing was cut a piece off of someone's tie and send it into the printer and say match this color. It was very random, he said. Then came along Pantone's founder, this guy named Larry Herbert, who solved this real problem by assigning colors, numbers, and formulas. Pantone started in the 1950s as a commercial printing company. Herbert invented this proprietary system for precise color matching, bought the company in 1962, renamed it Pantoneysm. renamed it Pantone, Pan for All, like pansexual, and tone for colors. And suddenly, everyone across all industries who uses color could speak the same chromatic language.

It was a revelation. Now, once Pantone created this taxonomy, this special lexicon, and once enough people spoke it, kind of felt like opting out became nearly impossible. So I was wondering, Corey, could you talk about how Pantone established this authority over color and color names, how it kind of beat out other systems. And do you think that that origin story is culty? I think the origin story is cult adjacent, cultish, because it's not entirely the whole story. So Pantone did create this proprietary color matching system. It's called the Pantone matching system. And Pantone, Larry Herbert, using his chemistry background, did sort of figure out a way to say,

okay, here's how we describe all of these colors, and here's the way that we create all of these colors using base pigments, right? So you could say serulian is made with 10% this, 5% that, 5% this, 2.5% that. So that is all true. There were color matching systems before Pantone, and they were commonly used across industry. The thing is, they weren't very good at marketing themselves beyond their own little industries. So even the Pantone matching system began, their core colors began with the core colors of another matching system called the Munsell system. So that starts us already, you know, this idea of something sort of being born ex-Nihillo and it takes over the world. It's built on a whole lot of other people's work and other attempts at creating systems of

communication between different industries. Now, the other thing about Pantone is we do think of it as like the color thing. But once you start dealing with the manufacture of color and different types of colors, Pantone is not actually the thing that gets used across all industries. Pantone has a huge range of colors, but there are industries that are like, nah, we've got our own proprietary colors. Car companies, paint companies have proprietary blends of paints that they then sell that might match to a Pantone color, but are not based on a Pantone color. They're not a Pantone R-T-M color. So yeah, there's certainly a mythology around Pantone, and there's a way that Pantone sort of knowingly or unknowingly feeds that mythology. But yeah,

the beginnings, the origins, it's like any company origin, right? Every company wants to be the one to have discovered the thing that they're selling. Totally, totally. And I actually do feel like some of the cultier in a slightly more nefarious sense, cult brands are the ones who paint themselves as these geniuses who created something

out of nothing that was totally original as opposed to just like owning the fact that like they're not really a disruptor. They're like kind of just in a lineage. Hey, I'm Mike Barronholz. On my new show, Funny You Ask, trivia starts the conversation and then things

immediately go off the rails. I ask a question. My guests think they know the answer. Sometimes they do. More often, they do not. And then the conversation takes a turn. One trivia question turns into stories about career highs, painful bombs, and behind the scenes moments that probably should have remained private. You'll hear confidence, misplaced confidence, bold guesses, wrong answers, quick laughs, and the slow realization that maybe this was a bad idea to say out loud. If you like smart comedy, sharp conversations, and trivia that exists purely to melt people's brains. This is Funny You Ask with me, Ike Barrenholz. Follow Funny You Ask with Ike Barronholds on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

When news breaks about Marvel, DC, Star Wars, or anything else you're obsessed with, the break room is where the conversation is happening. I'm John Costa. And I'm Zach Huddleston. Together with our co-host, Eric Voss, Jessica Clemens, Brandon Barrack and Gina Ipolito, we help you digest the headlines around your favorite fandoms, casting, plot leaks, interviews, actors crushing out on social media. We get into all of it. Plus, we do weekly after shows and Q&As for the breakroom's favorite shows and movies. We got you covered and we'll give you the

context you need to have a deeper understanding of the things you love. With new shows three times a week, you'll be up to speed in no time. Listen to the break room for free on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, my name is Emily. I'm calling from the Bay Area in California. As someone who used to be a graphic designer, there are so many culty things about Pantone. It's absolutely insane to me that one company has so much power over color across all sectors of design and that it's such a high cost to buy in. The Pantone swatchbooks go for a few hundred dollars and you have to replace them every few years because the printed spot colors can fade over time.

The absolute cultiest thing is the color of the year. I used to get so excited about the color of the year announcements, especially because they often picked very fun and interesting colors. But after this year's abysmal cloud dancer and 2025's ugly, poopy brown, the facade definitely fell away for me. The wizard behind the curtain is simply another greedy corporation. We don't have to use these supposedly trendy colors, and we don't need to listen to their contrived reasons for selecting them for us.

So I want to talk about this concept of turning color into intellectual property because that's what Pantone did. And in that pursuit, it created almost a sacred text out of these expensive color books that has spawned culty conflict, much like how people argue over the Bible. So if it wasn't already clear, Pantone didn't just standardize color in its own way. It actually owns it. So Pantone regards its colors and formulas as its intellectual property. You can't share them freely. Instead, if you want to be an insider with this elite access, you have to pay hundreds of dollars, if not more. This writer, Cleo Levin, reporting for Slate, wrote this piece called Pantone's Awful Period. And she said,

ultimately, it's become a way to try and make color a private business, which seems so crazy to me, like already privatizing something as universal as our experience of color feels like kind of culty. But then, as you already said, pinning these colors to like feelings and experiences and prophecies of the future, that is so intense. Are you aware of any controversies that have befallen Pantone or that Pantone has been involved with as a result of this kind of mishmash of culty behaviors? So there's two big ones that I can think of that sort of touch on each of these things. The first with the intellectual property.

And this is part of why Pantone is so ubiquitous in our minds when we think about color and you think about the industry of color, you automatically think of Pantone. Part of why that is, is they did do a whole lot of work to come up with new ways to print and describe colors, which is really helpful and really useful. But then they also, because they had made that their intellectual property, and they also sort of do that for companies that come to them. So, for instance, like Coca-Cola Red is a proprietary color that Pantone has developed. John Deere Green, proprietary color that Pantone has developed. Because they've done that with color, that also means that all of these design tools that people use and they don't think about also have to license color from Pantone. So I think it was in 2022 Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop users.

These are tools, if you don't know, that are really common in the graphic design. industry. And they come preloaded with this huge gamut of colors, which is really important when you're a designer. You need to have access to all these different colors. And it was the Pantone color system. There was some kind of business fufura that happened between Adobe and Pantone. And so Pantone required Adobe users to pay an additional, I think it was $15 a month, to be able to use pantone colors. And Adobe got real salty. And so they updated illustrator and Photoshop. And the next day, designers, illustrators opened up their tools to find that all of the Pantone licensed colors were black because there was no licensing. So this was this whole kerfuffle where suddenly people are like,

but wait a minute, I pay an Adobe license. That's an issue between Adobe and Pantone. Now you're telling me that these 3,000 colors, I can't use, but I need those. So that was one huge controversy that came about because of the intellectual property claims of pantone. And that was one that wasn't a thing that you think of like, oh, someone used Coca-Cola red and Coca-Cola sued them. That was entirely a Pantone-based controversy. The second one I can think of is it has to do with the color of the year.

Now, the color of the year, like the word of the year has not been going on forever. It started in 2000. It's very much about feeling. It's very much about we are forecasting trends. We're looking ahead. And it's about zeitgeist. It's about our collective consciousness. Right. So there's a whole lot of mystical woo-woo, you know, going on when you're communicating about this. Mystical woo-woo messaging that I'm telling you is like almost not to you, but for the average person is almost indistinguishable from a Keith Reneery quote. I swear to it. Yes. It's true. Yeah. It's true. But it's always. Also, color marketing and color forecasting in general is this very weird blend of economics, of fashion, of forecasting, of marketing, of psychology.

There's all these things that play into it because what you're trying to do. Vives. Yeah, all of us. I've heard a lot of vibe described as a dubious art. Yes. Yeah, and it is a dubious art. Pantone has had some color of the year missteps before. I believe. their color of the year for 2021. So we're smack in the, it means they're announcing it in December of 2020. Smack in the middle of the pandemic was a gray. And everyone was like, um, bad year for this very somber, dull, horrible color that reminds you, it's like funeral adjacent color, right? Exactly. So no one predicted a pandemic in 2020. No one did that. So, I think they kind of like had to race and like, oh, so then they re-released where they also

co-released a second color of the year that was like this highlighter yellow. It was just like, ah, which also looks like caution tape. Yeah, but it looked like caution tape, right? You're just like, oh, everything looks like it's on fire and dead. So they've had missteps. But there was one year, 2017, where I think the internet just got fed up with the idea that this was just all vibes and just connection with people and community. They released a green that I think was just called greenery. And TikTok, Instagram, a bunch of people were like, okay, A, no, stupid. B, what are you doing?

This looks like a cash grab because at the same time, Android was pushing back against the, I'm sorry for those of you who don't pay attention to your cell phones enough, like the rest of us. But if you have an Android phone and you text someone with an Apple phone, Apple's text bubble is blue and Androids is green. And there was a period of time where it was unfashionable to have a green text bubble. Android was pushing back against this. Google was trying to make green happen. And a whole bunch of people on TikTok and Instagram were like, well, this is clearly a ploy

to get us all okay with Android. And Pantone said, you know, no, no, no, no. of course not, that's ridiculous. But when you're only casting into the universe vibes, then those vibes can be shifted depending on the mood of the recipient. So if you're not saying we're forecasting green for this year because we're seeing a rise in environmental concerns or we're seeing more people going outside,

and that makes us think, if you're just saying this is about lush living and this is about communing with one another, with nature and fresh spaces. Like, that's open to interpretation. And if people are like, also green is the color of money. Yeah, you can't get around that. It's so true.

I think A, the fact that Pantone has this air of secrecy and exclusivity surrounding its secret sauces and its proprietary system, whatever. And the fact that it does purport to be this kind of like diviner of trends and this almost godlike way. You know, you said like no one predicted the pandemic, but there are all kinds of culty astrologers and conspiracy theorists who would say that they did. And there is kind of an astrologer conspiracy theorist energy to Pantone. But that attracts similar sort of conspiratorial thinking. And there are so many controversies that Pantone has encountered because of all of this. Speaking of like that TikTok stuff, I think what made TikTokers.

So I'll just explain exactly like you're saying. In 2017, TikTok exploded with these sort of like callouts that Pantone was secretly aligning its color of the year picks with corporate interests, all the while positioning itself as this morally superior, high art, vibes driven, genius driven institution, which felt hypocritical. Not only did that Pantone greenery shade seem to be like a promo tactic for Android in support of the green text bubbles, which like green text versus blue Texas's whole like other corporate culty war, but also Pantone was alleged to be aligning secretly with companies from Yelp to Delta Airlines to Airbnb to Apple. And you're spinning a lot of plates when your color of the year pick is supposed to like earnestly capture the zeitgeist. get that bag by, you know, secretly partnering or co-conspiriting with corporations. And that has led to a lot of color of the year controversies. Do you remember the period blood instance? Yes, I do.

Oh, boy. It was 2020. So it was like either pre-pandemic or pandemic era, basically Pantone partnered with the Swedish-based brand Intimina to create the color pure. which seemed to kind of be angling at destigmatizing menstruation, but was not appreciated by many consumers, many of the artists who make up pantone's most devoted followers. For example, the Argentinian artist group, Chromo Activismo responded by saying, how can we think that the shade period red can universally represent our menstrual palates? We feel the need to say once more

that we do not need the support of a global capitalist company that turns color into private property, a standardized merchandise. So I'm curious, like, in cults, secrecy is often framed as kind of transcendent wisdom. But how do you think that Pantone's opacity, ha ha, makes it sometimes kind of toneless, ha, ha, and culty in a bad way, especially during an era when consumers more than ever appreciate authenticity and transparency over polish. Yeah, this is always a tricky thing with any kind of proprietary event or thing? For me, the color of the year and the word of the year, I was involved in choosing words of the year for thousands of years since God is in short pants. So I know the mechanisms behind how you find a word of the year, what you're trying to communicate,

what you're not wanting to lean into, right? There's a whole lot. You get in your head and you want to be forward thinking, but you don't want to make a political statement. You want to make sure that you're encompassing as much of the zeitgeist as possible, but you don't want to be depressing. You don't want to seem flip, but you also don't want to always have the word of the year be fascism or democracy or, you know. So I understand it is a marketing game that is trying very hard to settle itself as a cultural arbiter somehow. So I say that as someone who understands the difficulty of trying to pick something like a color of the year or word of the year. But the thing with Pantone as well that gets trickier is that they choose their colors of the year well in advance because the whole point of the color of the year is they build pallets around it. And if Pantone is the king of color, then you have to orient your entire product base around what their color of the year is going to be.

Color forecasting for fashion runs 18 months to two years behind where it shows up. because that's just what the supply chain requires. So if your hot new color is rat summer green, well, that has to have been put into production a year prior. That has to have already been put into the sales chain six months before it shows up. So Pantone is trying really not just to sell a palette, but they're trying to do it in a way that makes it seem like it's a natural extension of what's happening right now, right in the moment.

And they, that gets tricky. You have to get into sort of this very high level, not very detailed, very vibes oriented kind of conversation to sell your color. This year's color of the year, cloud dancer was a big old stinker. Nobody liked it. For those of you not aware, Cloud Dancer isn't off white. It's just a white. It's white. I knew it came out because I started getting texts from people.

who were like, what do you think of the color of the year? And I was like, I'm asleep. I'm getting coffee. I don't know what the color of the year is yet. It's 6 a.m. I'm like, I can't deal with this right now. Some of us need to walk the dog, Barbara. But people were like, okay, a white, not a color, which, I mean, we could argue whether it is or not. We think of white as a color. We use the word white to refer to a color. But the other thing was, you know, people are like, in the year of our Lord, 2025. when ICE is targeting people and when we seem to be in an ascendant authoritarian regime that values whiteness as a racial characteristic of superiority and all of the sudden here's Pantone coming out with a white. I heard from folks that were like cloud dancer feels kind of appropriative of native people that sounds like, oh, you're sitting elk and cloud dancer. You know, so just nobody

liked the color. And the thing that's so funny to me is people didn't like the color because of the vibes put forth by it. It was like if they had chosen another color, blue or gold, I mean, it's because of how they framed it, it seemed very tone deaf, this very sort of light, ethereal. We want a blank slate. And it's like, yeah, but maybe not like this. Maybe, maybe not in this like, oh, we're just all, You know, it's just this lovely linen and denim and free air kind of vibe. It's like, that's not the vibe on the ground for 90% of people in America right now. When Westchette first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion.

Inline skates were everywhere. And two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when West Jet welcomes you on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime.

I wonder if my out-of-office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business. your family and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. The cultiest thing about Pantone is the swatch book. It's basically a holy text for designers. It's expensive, guarded, and treated with total reverence.

If it's not in the book, it might as well not exist. I'm an illustrator and designer, and it still blows my mind how seriously they're treated. Color used to be intuitive, and now it feels like you need to consult scripture before choosing a shade. Pantone didn't just organize color. They turned it into a doctrine. So yeah, Pantone definitely sounds like a cult.

I want to continue talking about Cloud Dancer. This, as you mentioned, was selected in December 2025 as the 26 color of the year. I came across a piece in The Guardian kind of breaking down the Cloud dancer controversy, a piece by Chloe McDowell, where she gathered a bunch of, you know, reactions from the public about it. One quote said that they felt that cloud dancer, well, first of all, Pantone, exactly, to your point, claimed that cloud dancer, which is literally like, it could not be more plain. It's not even like a fancy white. It feels like turbopane.

They said that it was a symbol of calming influence in a society, rediscovering the value of quiet reflection. It's bananas to me that they don't necessarily have like an emergency. backup, considering that they have to plan so far in the future. Because Boyle Boy did this fall worse than flat. The backlash was swift. And some of the quotes that Chloe McDowell gathered for the Guardian were along the lines of, you know, quote, it feels like a eugenicsy move. It's impossible to separate politics from fashion. Another quote went further calling cloud dancer, quote, a white supremacist dog whistle, the uncanny veneers of a Fox News broadcaster. Other

Quoters had comments about the sense of conformity, it seemed to encourage. Someone said, we're all being told that we need to look a very specific way and that this specific style is the most aesthetically pleasing. For me, it feels like a stripping back of any individuality, and that's really depressing to think about. And then another user said, curiously, Pantone's positioning of Cloud Dancer also reads as a nod to generative AI. They've called it a blank slate and a shade that opens the door to increased imagination and innovation, this is eerily similar to language used to persuade us to buy into AI tools that actually chip away, ha ha, another pun, at our creativity and critical thinking. So my question for you, Corey, is, ironically, Pantone did seem to

kind of capture the zeitgeist with this color choice, but not necessarily how they meant to. What do you think the cloud dancer scandal in particular says about the cultishly polarized times we're living in now overall? You know, I think what's interesting. interesting about the controversy over cloud dancer is it feels to me similar to controversies over various words of the year, the way that different words of the year hit, but a little bit more deeply felt. So in that sense, Pantone did what they needed to do, which is to have you associate this color with a deep feeling. And like, there it is. That's what that did. Not in the way they wanted you to think about it, but you know, it definitely made you feel a thing, whether that thing

was disgust or anger or calm or whatever. You felt a thing. The other thing that I think about with the cloud dancer controversy is language like color is so powerful because it's associative, right? We associate different types of language with other uses, with other people. And you associate color uses the same way, right? So for, you know, it's sort of the classic thing of like, you don't wear red to an American wedding because we associate red in America with loose morals, women of the night. Oh my God, that's so funny because I literally did wear kind of a... Did you wear red to a wedding? Yes, but I was actually trying to communicate loose morals subconsciously. Good job.

There you go. So I think I did that. And it had a really low back. Wait, I'm so dead. I wasn't even aware of what I was doing, but I was trying to send a message, I think, not explicitly, but I'm going to be thinking about that for the rest of the day. Oh, my God. You would have been in totally great in weddings in a bunch of Asian cultures like Japanese culture or Korean culture where you don't want to wear white because white is a funeral color. Don't wear white. Right. Right. So we have these very close associations between color and things and words and things. And the problem with Pantone is they're trying to take a color, which has a bunch of associations,

and they're trying to pair it with these words, and they're color people, but they're not word people. So I read the Cloud Dancer press release, just kind of cringy, because I was like, I know how this is going to be. I know how that phrase is going to sound to people. The blank slate in particular, I was like, oh, no, no, no. It's like, I don't see color.

It was like very giving that, right? Or the idea of, I mean, one of the other critiques I heard was that phrase, blank slate, was sort of received as let's just forget about all the things that have been going on. And let's just start over. And that's the thing is when you're trying to like get the zeitgeist, the problem with trying to get the zeitgeist or sort of make a big cultural statement is culture, as you said, is highly polarized. at this particular point. They're not trying to thread a middle way through right and left, people of color, white people, Karens and activists, like all of these things that whether they've meant to be moved further apart or not are perceived as or have moved further apart. Threading that middle way doesn't look smart. But also as a company, you don't want to make a political statement.

I know what would have done it. They could have had the exact same color and they could could have called it hockey ice rink and the heated rivalry people would have loved it and the gay hockey yeah no I don't think you could even call it gay hockey I think you just call it ice rink just call it ice rink just call it ice rink and now the gays love it and now I know pantone thank you I will invoice you for my consulting later that's what you have to do you have to find this sounds like a fun challenge for me this actually sounds like a board game I should invent You have to like find a term, a metaphor that means the exact thing that people wanted to mean to everyone.

Yeah, which is what a horoscope is. Basically, Pantone was a bad horoscope. I mentioned this in the book when I talk about the idea of naming colors because traditionally, like a Pantone deck, if you're a designer, Pantone doesn't use colors. And that was kind of for a lot of designers that I knew in the 90s, 80s, 90s, early 2000s, It was like a sign of your shops if you could be like, oh, that's Pantone, you know, 217B. Like, you know, it was just Pantone notoriously did not name their colors. And Leitra Seisman, the head of their color marketing and color forecasting service, wrote in one of her books that the reason why you don't name a color or if you want to evoke a different feeling, you don't need a new color.

You just need a new name. So brown is not going to sell nearly as well as chocolate. because chocolate sounds luxurious and indulgent. Yes. And burnt sienna is only going to sell to artists or people who think of Crayola. But if you call that cognac, well, now suddenly, that's a high fashion term. Right. So even the way that Pantone names their colors, it's not just meant to evoke a feeling,

but there's something that's called fancy name effect with color, where the sort of more fanciful than name, the higher value it's perceived within marketing circles. So it's sort of like cranberry is going to be a LL Bean, Lansend kind of color. But that same color called Merlo is going to be, well, now we're moving up into like the Zara. And then there was one company that I was following their color naming patterns for a couple of years. And they had one year where they had five colors. They had a white, a black, a brick red, a bright. yellow and like a sky blue. The white was called something like void. The black was called something

like flat. The yellow was called brick. The red was called canary. And the blue was called like 17. Oh my God. Okay. But also, but it's like, okay. All right. Yeah, but this was the thing. It's, it's taking the fancy name effect to the extreme. Like to the next level. Yes. You want to dress in Canary, that will be red. Like, what are words? What is meaning? It's totally. It's fascinating because, you know, obviously the Pantone as opposed to a cult brand like IKEA is quite elitist. It's little pretentious. It's not for everybody. Some cults, whether we're talking about lighthearted cults, cult brands or serious cults are more populist. They're trying to recruit everyone, like evangelicalism. But some cults are trying to remain exclusive and fringe like the Bohemian growth. Because like cult leaders

and people with cult-ish leader-ish inclinations seek the type of power that they think they can get. So like me personally with my background and my disposition, I'm not going to start a softball sorority. Type cult. You know, like I would start the cult that like aligns with the type of people that I think I would attract. And that's obviously what Pantone has done. But I actually think that Pantone's strategy has aged less like Morelo and more like milk or

whatever, more like void. because simply of how our broader culture has become more crisis-ridden and polarized and desperate for someone just to tell us the truth. And I think that has really clashed with how corporate and performative and grandiose and thus controversial the Pantone Color of the Year has become. First of all, like the color of the year baseline to me feels kind of like a cult ritual, You know, like every cult has like that annual thing that the people look forward to, whether it's like the Mary Kay Career Conference or the Taylor Swift tour, don't come for me or, you know, whatever, the tent revival. And for Pantone, that's color of the year. And I have noticed just even through combing through the press releases how much loftier and more highfalutant and how much bigger the promises of the color of the year have gotten.

For example, I was reviewing, you talked about this, the ultraviolet color of the year from 2018. Pantone claimed that that, you know, purply color invoked Prince, David Bowie, Jimmy Hendrix, but also they were like throwing words in there like assaille and mindfulness and the cosmos. And it was very much giving like goop five years ago or whatever. Like it was just like throwing a bunch of buzzwords out there. but they were all fairly innocuous. But then we had period blood or whatever. And then we had cloud dancer.

And it's all just starting to feel messier. It's starting to feel cultier. And I'm fascinated by that. So another cult quality that we like to analyze the show is like exit costs. One of the ways that you know you're in a more destructive cult rather than a harmless cult is when they make leaving kind of hard. You mentioned before that Adobe hullabaloo where Adobe removed the Pantone colors from its products and suddenly people were left high and dry. As I mentioned, you know, in plenty of cult dynamics, leaving is technically allowed but socially costly.

Do you think Pantone's power persists because it's really that useful or because it feels too hard to opt out? I mean, I think it's a little of both, actually. I think at this point, it is really difficult to opt out of using pantone colors if only because, let's say I'm starting a company and I come up with a logo and I want this logo to be red. And I make my red logo and I go out in the world and then I get a call from Coca-Cola's legal departments. Like, hey, we're going to send you a cease and desist because your logo is a little swoopy thing that looks kind of like our logo. But more importantly, we have right. to using that color. This is a thing that happens all the time. So all of a sudden, even if I don't know what Pantone is, suddenly I have to be aware of the fact that this particular color might be licensed and owned, might be the intellectual property of another company. And the people that those companies tend to work with are Pantone. Because Pantone is huge. Like it's sort of the big design industry standard in America. Again, there are different color services.

and there are different color forecasting groups. So they're not the only ones out there, but they are the biggest. So that makes it hard to opt out because they're the biggest. And part of why they're the biggest is not just because they were smart about how they got into the design market. I mean, honestly, if you're going to try and corner a market that is heavily design-based, absolutely go for designs. It's very smart. But the other thing is that Pantone has increased its physical size.

by being acquired by and acquiring other companies. So we think of Pantone as sort of this one thing, but Pantone actually has in its group a whole bunch of other companies that also do color measurement, color forecasting, color standards, that you have never heard of before. You've never heard of any of these companies. But if I'm a person who is doing color grading, let's say, and I'm looking at the color of beer.

I'm measuring the colors of beer because we know that beer that's this yellow is perceived as being better value, and if it's darker, if it looks off or it looks green, it's not going to, whatever. This is a thing that sounds ridiculous. This is actually a thing that any kind of mass-produced thing

goes through is color matching. It has to look like the right color. It has to look like the color it's supposed to be. So if I want to color match my beer, I'm probably going to go to a place like X-Rite, let's say. It's a company that produces color standards and I'll say, hey, I need a color standard for beer. And they'll say, great, well, produce that. Well, X-Rite is part of Pantone.

Or let's say that I am trying to do color education and I want to get a proprietary set of pastels for my students that are focused on like I want a CMIK pastel set and then I want flashlights that are red, green, blue so that I can teach additive and subtractive mixing to my students. Great. So I'm going to go to a company that's not Craola because I can't afford Creola. I'm going to go to someone at Dana Hare and say, I need these. I'm going to be like, great, here it is. Danahar is part of Pantone. So it's sort of like, even if you're not aware of it, Pantone and it's subsidiaries and the companies that make up the Pantone universe, kind of are everywhere in color. So it's really difficult to not use a Pantone problem. at some point in the production chain. It's just really difficult not to. You can decide not to,

but then you run into possible, you know, is this accurate? Is my scale accurate? Have I used a proprietary color that I'm not supposed to? If I'm going to use Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop, I'm using the Pantone color set. And I can load a separate color set for free, but I have to go find it and I have to download it. And I have to convince my clients then that this color set is just as good as Pantone because my clients have only ever heard of Pantone. So there is an exit cost. You can leave. You can say I'm not using Pantone. And lots of places decide they're not going to. But there are consequences. Wow. You know, it's super interesting because when that whole Adobe thing went down, an artist created an alternative palette that he called Freetone, this artist named Stuart Semple.

It was his whole thing. Pantone's president at the time were super. We're so. responded calmly to the whole controversy with a soundbite that I think he thought ate. And he was like, nobody has to use Pantone. It became a de facto standard because it worked the best. And while that might be true, I couldn't help but notice that it's also what every enduring culty belief system has ever said. Like, you could swap in the word Christianity for Pantone. You could swap in the word capitalism. Like, they're just the things that have taken over. Nobody. has to use Christianity. It became the de facto standard because it worked the best. It's wild. And like the consequences have been expensive and dramatic. I did read in the Slate article that I

quoted earlier by Cleo 11 that Pantone system has become the basis for plenty of lawsuits. And that Pantone actually makes it easier for corporations to sue others for trademark colors. For example, Hershey has sued Mars over orange, Lubiton has sued Yves Saint Laurent over red and T-Mobile has sued pretty much everyone over magenta. Yes, they have. It just allows more culty conflict between corporations, which feels really dramatic and hostile. I don't know. Like, the stakes get high. Well, I mean, for corporations, it's money. You're paying Pantone to develop a color for you and someone else is using that color. I mean, where I used to work at Merriam-Webster, Merriam Webster has a proprietary red. And there were times when other companies would create reference

books that used a similar format and used a similar red. And that was a concern, right? So for companies, and it's kind of, this is where the crossover between the corporate uses and the color of the year uses happen, is that a company is trying to build a brand, which produces a feeling in people. And if they can do that with a particular color, that's the color they're going to use. And they want to own that color. So, I mean, if there's any cult behind it, it's the cult of capitalism. It's the cult of making money. Only in America could color become a cult. Yes, it's true. In that way. In that particular way. Yeah. So it is interesting because you do have this overlap then of the like vibes and money. And when those two things cross, it's always going to get messy.

It's just always going to be a mess. That is exactly the summation. Okay. Corey, I want to play a game with you. All right. It sounded distinctly like the guy in the movie saw. I don't mean it that way. Right.

There's no death. You're not in my room. We're okay. I'm safe. No, totally. This is a safe space. You're safe ultimately. But I do think this game might end up being psychologically more harrowing

than it might appear. The game is called culty quotes, and it's played like this. I'm going to read you a series of quotes that were either said by notorious cult leaders from history or they were pulled from a pantone color of the year press release.

And you're going to have to guess which is which. Was it a cult leader or was it a pantone press release? All right, let's do it. The first quote goes like this. Choosing rest and consciously stepping away from relentless demand,

and turning inward, recognizes that true strength lies not just in doing, but also in being. Pantone. Correct. That was from the cloud dancer press release at the end of 2025. Next quote, when we smile, the world smiles with us. Each experience of joy is an experience of joy for all people and a victory for humankind. Ooh, cult leader. That is correct. That was Keith Laniery, the leader of nexium. The next quote goes like this.

The act of kindness is such a powerful weapon that it is endless in its scope. You can never run out of kindness. Kindness is the supreme gift of the elevated person. It is the beauty of the beauty of the beauty. Cult leader. That is correct. That was Yogi Budgen, the founder of the Happy, Healthy, Holy Organization.

Next quote. The everlasting search for harmony filters through into every aspect of our lives, including our relationships, the work we do, our social connections, and the natural environment that surrounds us. Pantone. Yes, you are absolutely correct. That is from the press release for the 2025 Moka Moose announcement.

Two more quotes. The next one goes, is it better to live in a world where everyone is happy all the time, even if that happiness is artificial? Do you wish for world peace and happiness all the time? Are you sure? I'm going to go cult leader. That is absolutely correct. And that is Elon Musk.

Oh, God. Indeed. That also makes sense, yes. Yeah, it does. And the very last quote goes like this. We are living in transformative times. As we emerge from an intense period of isolation, our notions and standards are changing. And our physical and digital lives have merged in new ways.

Oh, pantone. Ding, ding. That is absolutely right. That is from their 2022 announcement of the very peri color of the year. Okay, you're exceptionally good at that, but I just have to say I was stupefied when I started combing through these pantone press releases because they're so grandiose and prophetic. Like, what the fuck? Anytime I read a pantone color of the year press release, I'm always reminded of a quote that the head of their color marketing service, Leotris Eisman, said in a little, a workshop I did with her, where she said, remember that what we're selling is not necessarily a

color. We're selling a feeling. And that just, anytime I read a pantone thing, I'm like, yep, you're tapping into a feeling. You're not trying to sell mocha moose, which is not even called mocha moose. Like, that's the name they give it for the color of the year. It's a PMS number with, you know, 107C or something like that. But when you're selling a color, what you want is to connect with the feeling. You want people to see this. brown that at the time when mocha moose came out everyone was like that looks kind of like poop and no no no no it's luxurious it's a sense of coziness and well-being and you're painting a whole tableau so that people will your world building yeah absolutely so people will buy whatever a coffee

cup in mocha moose or a set of pencils in mocha moose or a blouse in monta-moose or a blouse and tone the ultimate spin doctors i tell you Hi, my name is Sophie and I live in New England and work as a color chemist. The cultiest thing about Pantone is how expensive the guidebooks are and how often your sister replace them. Small manufacturers like the one I work at can't afford to drop thousands each year on new guides and you can't just replace the damage pages. Okay, Corey, I have one final question for you and it's the most important one of the day. Out of our three cult categories. Live your life.

Watch your back and get the fuck out. Which do you think the cult of Pantone falls into? Ooh, that's tricky. Honestly, I think it's a live your life. Unless you own a company and then it's probably a watch your back. But for most people, again, most people, when they think of pantone, they think of the color of the year. And you can have a strong reaction to that and be like, I hate cloud dancer. I hate greenery. I hate mocha moose. I think mocha moose is racist. I think cloud dancer is racist. You can say whatever you want. But it's not like when you boot up your computer, it's all going to be in gray scale because you have badmouthed pantone. It's a live your life. If you're a company, though, and you're interested in using color to communicate something, it might be a little watch your back.

I'm not going to say that pantone is the only color forecasting company or the only company you can use. I mean, honestly, most major manufacturers have their own in-house color team, right? Nike has its own color forecasting team that sets the palette for the next seasons. Apple has its own color marketing team that basically decides what all Apple products are going to be. Everyone has an internal team. Pantone has the mystique of sort of finger on the pulse, look at what we did with Coca-Cola, look at what we've done with John Deere. I mean, and that's, tempting. So if you're a company and you're deciding like, I'm not going to use Pantone, I don't think that's a bad thing. But you do have to be aware that Pantone owns the industry at this

point. And so you just have to like cross your teas, dot your eyes. But for most of us, live your life. Like Cloud Dancer, hate Cloud Dancer, paint your house pink. I don't care. No, no one cares. It's fine. Yeah. For sure. No, I completely agree. I think at the end of the day, even though people are worshipping at the altar of these stupid books of colors and I'm annoyed by many of Pantone's antics, it's not like traumatizing anyone. Like, yeah, it has loki a monopoly, but everyone's kind of fine. Yeah, yeah. And also, if you decide that you want nothing to do with Pantone, the best thing you can do is just anytime you see a color anywhere in. a store, on a shirt, whatever. Just think to yourself. Someone chose that color and I can choose not to like it.

And that's all you got to do. Thank you so much, Corey, for engaging in this sensationalist conversation with me. I had so much fun. If people want to keep up with you and buy your book, where can they do that? You can buy my book at any bookseller that you so desire. I personally like bookshop.org. The title again is true color. strange and spectacular quest to define color from Azure to zinc pink. I'm on blue sky as Corey Stamper with K and Y. And I do have a blog that I occasionally write very occasionally at Coreystamper.com. Love that. Well, that's her show. Thank you so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty. Sounds Like a cult was created by Amanda Montel and edited by Jordan Moore of The Podcabin.

This episode was hosted by Amanda Montel. Our managing producer is Katie Epperson. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show a lot. And if you like this podcast, feel free to check out my book, Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, The Age of Magical O overthinking, notes on Modern irrationality and word slut a feminist guide to taking back the English language. Thanks as well to

our network studio 71. And be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse at Sounds like a cult pod or support us on Patreon to listen to the show ad-free at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult.