Deep purple named the Pantone colour of 2018

What we have here in 2017 is a heap of chaos and disruption. What we need in 2018? The Pantone Color Institute thinks whatever that might be will come in the deep purple hue of “Ultra Violet”, its colour of the year revealed on Thursday.

The colour wasn’t chosen because it’s regal, though it resembles a majestic shade. It was chosen to evoke a counterculture flair, a grab for originality, ingenuity and visionary thinking, said Pantone vice president Laurie Pressman.

“We are living in complex times,” she said. “We’re seeing the fear of going forward and how people are reacting to that fear.”

Ms. Pressman wasn’t keen on talking politics. The colour, she said, playing out in home design, industrial spaces and products, fashion, art and food, reflects the idea of living not inside the box or outside the box but with no box at all. Specifically, she called the colour “that complexity, that marriage, between the passionate red violets and the strong indigo purples.”

Ultra Violet leans more to blue than red and that, Ms. Pressman said, “speaks to thoughtfulness, a mystical quality, a spiritual quality.” There’s still a passionate heat from enough red undertones, and a touch of periwinkle, but “it’s really the cool that prevails.”

The 2018 colour of the year follows 2017’s “Greenery”, a grassy fresh, revitalising shade that reflected new beginnings.