Color of the Year - Will it Influence Your Wedding?
New years bring new trends, including the Pantone color of the year! I’m assuming you probably want to know what that is. Classic Blue!
“What does this mean? Why should I care? I’m just going to choose my favorite colors for my wedding color scheme anyways…and hey, if ‘Classic Blue’ happens to be one of my favorite colors, then cool! I guess I’m trendy.” This may be what you’re thinking. Huh. Funny, because I’m sure I would probably think the same thing if Tim and I were getting married again in 2020!
If you are like me, you are probably a little indifferent at first. Cool, the color of the year is blue! But that doesn’t really have an effect on me or my wedding. However, the idea of blue being the 2020 color of the year, made me interested to look deeper into the way it is chosen and why it was decided as the color we will no doubt be seeing a lot of soon.
You may be surprised at the careful thought that goes into choosing certain colors and why at the end of this article, you might want to consider it, or other colors you never thought of, in your wedding color scheme.
“Instilling calm, confidence, and connection, this enduring blue hue highlights our desire for a dependable and stable foundation on which to build as we cross the threshold into a new era.”
This is the quote at the top of Pantone’s “Color of the Year” article. Immediately, the words “calm, confident, and connection” stand out. Who doesn’t want to feel calm, confident, and connected?! When you first read the quote, you may have chuckled to yourself a bit because of the heavy weight of influence it assumes blue will have on the world...But let’s be real, they’ve got something going on here!
There is a powerful psychology behind colors. If you ever followed the fad of the mood ring, you will remember the little card included with the jewelry that was your key to what emotion each color represented--red, scared; yellow, nervous; purple, calm; etc. I think everyone tested their emotions when they put on the ring, but rarely found it always accurate. However, in a similar way, the emotions some colors evoke are totally accurate. You may not realize the daily things we experience in life that color dictates. Stop lights are one example--green means go, red means stop. We associate those colors with those meanings, and as a result react to them.
When choosing a color scheme for your wedding, you might want to consider the emotions those colors will evoke and how they may dictate the feel and atmosphere of your wedding day. With bright and cheery colors, your guests may feel encouraged to let loose, party, and go a little crazy on the dance floor. However, with a darker, deep color scheme (like burgundy, navy blue, and gray), your atmosphere may be more directed towards an elegant, classy, formal feel. And the thing is, both are great! It all just depends on what kind of feel you are going for on your wedding day.
This is why I am now convinced that colors are a huge influencer in the feel of your wedding day. I personally always liked the idea of having blue in my wedding color scheme when Tim and I got married, but I thought it was just because I liked the color blue! After I read about why Pantone chose the color, I realized there was more to it.
These are the adjectives Pantone uses to describe the color blue: Elegant, Restful, Peaceful Tranquil, Clarifying, Reflective, Resilient, Solid, Dependable, Reliable.
On the surface, my choice to include blue in my wedding was because of my love for the color itself. However, I look back now and realize that the feel of the wedding we were going for was super chill and comfortable for everyone. The colors we chose had an association with calmness, familiarity, and were more subtle than bold. We didn’t go into it thinking, “we’ve gotta choose colors that will dictate the emotions of all of our guests!” But, without really intending to, we knew what we wanted the feel of the day to be, and the colors automatically mirrored that. BOOM. Influence of colors.
After reading all of this, you should not think that if you choose bold and bright colors, you are guaranteed to have a crazy, fun, wild wedding, or a quiet, laid back wedding if you choose more subtle colors. There are more factors than just color that dictate the way your wedding day goes.
But here are the things you know: You have an idea of what kind of wedding you want to have. You have an idea of what you might choose for your color scheme. And now you know that colors will have some sort of impact on the feel of your wedding day.
What do you do with this information? First don’t overthink it and don’t stress out about how your colors are going to make you and your wedding guests feel. Instead, use it to your advantage! Choose the colors you want and know that you have this awesome tool to help dictate what your day looks like through the colors you choose!
Tip: If you happen to choose the color of the year and are going with the traditional “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” you can check “something blue” off your list right away...
I don’t claim to be an immediate expert on all of this stuff--I just do my research and bring it all to you with the hopes that it will save you from all that extra digging for information! Here’s where I found this info:
https://www.pantone.com/color-intelligence/color-of-the-year/color-of-the-year-2020