• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, December 10, 2010

You got to admire the public relations genius who came up with the idea of Pantone sponsoring an annual bestowing of Color of the Year honors on some unsuspecting hue that was just minding its business in the middle of the 1,925 colors that make up the Pantone Fashion + Home Color System.

And the 2011 winner is ... Honeysuckle.

"In times of stress, we need something to lift our spirits. Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going -- perfect to ward off the blues," says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, in a release announcing the choice. "Honeysuckle derives its positive qualities from a powerful bond to its mother color red, the most physical, viscerally alive hue in the spectrum."

Exactly what I was thinking.

You've also got to admire the way that Pantone has extended the brilliant idea of Lawrence Herbert in 1963 to create a system for identifying, matching and communicating colors into a whole palette of products and services. The fan-formatted book of standardized color that quickly became as ubiquitous in art departments as X-Acto knives is but one of many offerings the X-Rite, Inc. subsidiary now offers for both industry and consumers, including a research and development lab, consulting services and 200 or so official Pantone "wedding colors."

Back to Honeysuckle and the press it has generated. The Wall Street Journal's Christina Brinkley got the beat with a story in advance of yesterday's official announcement. She points out that the "sherbety shade of pink, with a hint of red and orange zest" isn't seen that way by everyone because flowers are different shades, including yellow or white, in different parts of the country.

A Pantone spokeswoman tells her in response that "people's opinion of honeysuckle's color derives from the flower they saw as children." I'm not sure what that means to you, but to Tom Mirabile, head of global trends and design at Lifetime Brands, "it's a very 'Mad Men' pink. It's like the lipstick our mothers wore."

An accompanying WSJvideo about the announcement calls honeysuckle "optimistic," "sexy," "vibrant" and claims it's "the kind of color that makes you buy things."

Now here's the thing. I personally wouldn't know honeysuckle from fuchsia from magenta. In fact, when I read in Wikipedia that fuchsia is just a synonym for magenta (and, once upon a time, "brilliant rose" in Crayola Crayon colors), it makes perfect sense to me.

And although Pantone itself offers very specific guidelines as to what constitutes the color, or its nearest approximation, in the various color systems it promulgates for everything from fashion to packaging, I'm not too good at differentiating. After looking at a bunch of examples the Los Angeles Times presents of dresses currently gracing the runways, I'm further flummoxed. Do they all look like the same shade to you?

There are limits to PR hypery such as this, of course.

No doubt it's a good thing for things as fleeting as women's fashions to have a new color every year. But durable goods demand more enduring hues. Harvest Gold or Avocado Green don't just define 365 days. They define an entire era. When I see a Harvest Gold electric stove, I can hear Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles, see an astronaut splashing down in the Pacific and hear the disruptive ring of a rotary-dial phone.

Mauve is another color that's always given me a problem, from the first time I came across Thomas Beer's book The Mauve Decade, which is about American life at the turn of the 19th century. The Reader's Encyclopedia informs us: "The color yellow had already been described as typical of the period in England and Beer, trying similarly to capture the essence of the decade in America, chose mauve as the significant tone: 'pink turning to purple.'"

So, it would appear, this attention to color is not a recent development cut entirely from whole cloth. In fact, in looking up The Mauve Decade, I encountered another book titled Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World. Turns out that mauve was the color of the first synthetic dye, discovered by serendipity by an 18-year-old chemistry student named William Perkin in 1856.

Anyway, you know how when someone says something like, "boy, I haven't heard a song by the Turtles in a dog's age," all of a sudden you hear a bunch of Turtles songs? As I was diligently researching arcane matters such as this into the wee hours, an ad for LG smart phones comes on the TV and what do I immediately notice? The new LG logo is wrapped in honeysuckle. Or is that fuchsia?