This Surprising Color Will Be Everywhere in 2026. Can You Guess What It Is?
Just when you thought that, surely, the tsunami of color of the year (or, endearingly, COTY) announcements for 2025 had subsided, WGSN—one of the world’s top trend forecasting agencies—decided to enter the chat. In collaboration with Coloro, a comprehensive color system, WGSN revealed its COTY prediction for not just one but two years down the line.
The It color for 2026? Brace yourself...it’s Transformative Teal!
Teal sits at the intersection between blue and green—appearing on dragonflies’ wings, ocean waves, and (if you’re bold enough) on cabinets, kitchen islands, bookshelves, and beyond. Touting its “versatile” and “multifaceted” qualities, WGSN’s head of color, Urangoo Samba, called Transformative Teal “an intriguing new dark that feels both mysterious and mesmerizing.”
Why teal in 2026, though, and why “transformative”? Per WGSN, it embodies an “Earth-first mindset,” “planet positivity,” and resilience. In two years, WGSN predicts—via its data-based forecasting methods—that people will increasingly demand changes to how we interact with the environment at large, as well as the microenvironments we find ourselves in on any given day. It’s only fitting that a color merging the particular shades of lush forests and all the world’s oceans was picked as a representative for all of these concepts. This means you just might see teal popping up everywhere: on armchair fabrics, runways, and the exteriors of your fave headphones’ latest model.
Color trends obsessives may remember that a different azure, Benjamin Moore’s Aegean Teal, was selected as that paint company’s 2021 COTY. We’ve also seen other rich jewel tones (see Behr’s Rumours) rise to the fore in recent years. Is there something in the (teal-colored, of course) water? You’ll have to wait until 2026 to find out.
You Might Also Like
