I’m tired of the grey. I’m also tired of the cars that are various shades of primer. They just look bad.

People across the road just painted their house a bright teal. It looks really bad because they painted everything! The siding, the brick, the accents, and "shutters". They left no contrasting lines or spaces, just teal everywhere.

And to top it off they hired someone to do it! So I agree, people dont understand color.

Article needs a LOT more pictures.

I painted my house purple

I don't know if its validating or disappointing to be seen so thoroughly by an article like this. On the one hand, I absolutely identify with the memes that are like "men will live like this without issue" and it's just an arm chair and TV in an otherwise empty room. Aesthetics, while noticeable to me, are simply never much of a priority. However, at the same time, I also feel like taking ownership of your living space and having the confidence to imprint aspects of your personality on it is a mark of maturity in some ways.

So, I find myself stuck in an increasingly silly feedback loop of not caring about aesthetics -> feeling bad for not caring -> trying to brainstorm some ideas for how to spruce things up -> having anxiety over the infinite combinations of possibilities without a "correct" answer -> throwing my hands up and returning to not caring.

We work on it in therapy, I guess, lol.

My internal conspiracy theory is that McDonald's deliberately chose the boring, gray and block redesign for nearly every location now BECAUSE it's less inviting.

They don't want people to eat in, or even stop by to go to the drive thru. What they want is to push the fast food market towards delivery, because the profit margins are so much better. They can't just close dining rooms and drive thrus entirely, because that would scare consumers and drive down stock prices. So instead they're using boring shades of gray and hostile design to make people not WANT to go to McDonald's, and instead just order it through DD.

Well considering up until the 1960s everything was in black and white, this just seems like another one of those fads that becomes popular again years later like JNCO jeans.

There's a big factor that i didn't see in my skim of the article: painting and repainting costs time and money. In the 60s, 70s and 80s consumers had the money to mess around with colors on a whim. You had the money to buy a new car and keep it in whatever condition you like. If you changed your mind later, nbd, just change it back.

These days I don't know anyone with a house (of those who can afford them) who can spend money on anything but the safest and most conservative options. Even if you put aside resale value of a home or vehicle, a daring color will probably fade or your tastes will change or it will clash with new surroundings or become hard to match as it's phased out of stock.

In 10 years I'll probably feel exactly the same about my off-white wall as I do now. It will look the same with basically any furniture. It might fade to a slightly different shade of unobtrusive white. Why would I spend my limited money to give my future self headaches? Just for a different vibe?

Like so many proclamations that some particular cultural shift is permanent, this will only be true until it isn't.

My wife yelled at me for getting the wrong red, because I got crimson instead of ruby. So yeah I get it.

isn't this a well known thing? in times of economic downturn people purchase less colorful stuff as it depreciates slower

Calling bullshit on this. Color will make a comeback. I give Wet Paint Grey 2 more years before people have had enough of it as a favorite car color. I think interior and exterior house paint colors might not improve until the fall of global fascism which admittedly doesn't seem likely anytime real soon.

Painting is expensive. Not everyone has good taste / the same taste. It stands to reason that safer colorschemes prevail. Painting your house some garish pink blue and red combo feature that punches you in the retinas is bold, and if you like it do it, but know that the money you spend on that is "labor of love" money you don't get back.

We were looking used car earlier this year. At the dealership there was one beautiful green car that was a different model then we wanted but was discounted because "it was a weird color". We looked for a few weeks to find the car we wanted to a color that wasn't white or black. We couldn't find one so we went with white.

Since the late 2000s, Buckter has watched with dismay as essentially colorless colors—think white, beige, gray—have taken over. “It’s not even three shades, or four shades, of gray. It’s just one dark gray,” he said.

The share of new cars in grayscale colors rose from 60 percent in 2004 to 80 percent in 2023. Production of purple cars dropped 93 percent over that period, gold by 97 percent.

So, that's certainly true for cars in the US

I've read articles about that and was amazed when I realized rhe shift myself. I can believe that it's true for houses in San Francisco, though I'm not certain that that's true nationwide and the article doesn't cite data supporting that other than in Washington, DC.

But I'm not sure that it's true in, say, clothing, and the article doesn't cite figures there. I'm wearing muted earth tones, but the next person over in the restaurant I'm in is wearing a bright green shirt, and the guy bicycling by outside is wearing yellow.

And I'm not sure that it's true globally.

I'm pretty confident that at least in menswear, the US is more colorful than it was, say, a century back. Maybe not if you compare to the 1970s.

This article is only focusing on items that are usually for resale: Homes, cars, appliances as part of the home, etc. The colors are safe. Commercial spaces are your spots of color because they're making their own statement. Clothing is expendable so you're going to see bright colors in that. Lighting that you take with you can be colorful, your furniture, etc. It depends on the cost really.