What will be the watch colour of the year in 2023?
Luke BenedictusA couple of years ago, the watch world became flooded with a sea of green. Dials were awash with the colour in multiple shades – from the Patek Phillippe Nautilus in a metallic shade of olive to the mossy hue of the Tudor Black Bay Fifty-Eight 18k. Green was the undisputed colour of the year.
The green party of 2021 was unusual due to the sheer number of brands that jumped on board. Green was hardly a novelty colour, but the extent of its use that year was striking. The default colours of watch dials, after all, still tend to be some variation of black or white, with blue always hovering as another perennial favourite with bags of mass appeal. For a moment that year, green looked set to gate-crash that chromatic elite.
Last year didn’t muster anything really comparable. Sure, there was a notable crop of purple releases while Hodinkee made a compelling case that rainbow colours were the design trend of 2022. But what colour can we expect to dominate our wrists in 2023? Well, as any gambling man knows, if you want to predict a result, it’s always worth taking a look at the form guide.
For that, the best place to start is probably the Pantone Institute. For almost 25 years, the colour-matching company has embarked on an extensive cross-disciplinary analysis of prominent hues within art, fashion, design and beyond. From there, they deliberate for months before finally selecting their “Colour of the Year”. Unveiled in December, in the build-up to the new year, these colour boffins predict the shade that they believe will set the tone for the year to come.
Their last prediction certainly foreshadowed the purple patch of 2022 releases (previously if your wrist turned purple you’d just fastened your watch too tightly). That’s because Pantone’s colour of that year was called “Very Peri”, which looked an awful lot like Prince’s favourite colour to me.
Did Pantone foretell the green trend of 2021? Not really. That year, they controversially announced two colours of the year: “Ultimate Gray”, which is basically, well, grey with a sexed-up prefix and “Illuminating”, which turned out to be a specific yellow like the inside of a ripe pineapple. Green was nowhere to be seen. Except that, if you really want to give Pantone the benefit of the doubt, should you mix “Ultimate Gray” and “Illuminating” together, then you’d probably be left with a slightly depressing shade of olive.
For 2023, Pantone have declared that the colour of the year is “Viva Magenta”. Essentially, this is a berry red that lurks in a sort of prismatic hinterland between warm and cool. It’s described by Pantone Colour Institute’s executive director, Leatrice Eiseman, as “audacious, witty” and like “a fist in a velvet glove”. Whereas I’d say it was eerily similar to the colour of a small dog’s cock.
So will we honestly see this colour start to infiltrate the watch world this year? Personally, I doubt that it could emerge as forcefully as, say, green did in 2021. But that’s because green is a fairly easy and wearable colour to consider strapping onto your wrist. Red meanwhile is far bolder and more of a statement. It’s not a colour that will scare the horses as such, but it might make them just a little bit jumpy.
Then again, I am actually writing this with a red-dialled watch on my wrist. The watch in question is the Mido Ocean Star Tribute Gradient, which I picked up quite randomly last year. As I wrote here, this watch is far from my usual cup of horological tea. But I’m really enjoying this watch. The dial may be red, but its matte texture and smoky gradient tone it down to ensure that it’s nowhere near as startling as, say, the arse of a randy baboon. Plus, it goes brilliantly with blue, too – the dominant shade of my thoroughly unimaginative wardrobe. So my advice is don’t be fast to dismiss the “Viva Magenta” possibility when you’re shopping about for your next watch. Like me, you might discover that you quite like being caught red-handed after all.