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why this year's colors of the year are super similar

Pale green dining room/Photography: Sherwin-Williams/Evergreen Fog is Sherwin-Williams's 2022 Color of the Year—a hue that other brands forecasted for the year ahead, too.

Light green is officially trending. If you're anything like us, you've been paying attention to different paint brands' Color of the Year announcements—and you've noticed something peculiar: From Benjamin Moore and Sherwin-Williams to PPG and Behr, major paint brands all selected a minty, muted green for next year's color. A new story in The Washington Post delves into just why the hue is trending right now.

Historically, different brands tend to choose different hues: in 2020, for instance, Benjamin Moore opted for the rosy hue First Light, while Sherwin-Williams selected a navy blue, Naval. Behr chose Back to Nature, a muted green, and PPG selected Chinese Porcelain, an inky blue, that same year.

A pale green office/Photography: Benjamin Moore/A pale sage—October Mist 1495—is Benjamin Moore's Color of the Year for 2022.

This year's widespread selection of green was surprising even to the different paint brands. "In all the years I’ve been working on this program, this is the first time anyone else has even come close [to picking the same shade]," Kelly Sinatra of Benjamin Moore told the Post. "We find out what the other brands chose when everyone else does... And yeah, we were shocked."

Dining area in green and white paint/Photography: Farrow & Ball/Breakfast Room Green is one of Farrow & Ball's trending colors for the year ahead.

Those 2022 hues include: Benjamin Moore's October Mist; Sherwin-Williams's Evergreen Fog; PPG's Olive Sprig; Behr's Breezeway, and Glidden's Guacamole. And even though Valspar and Farrow & Ball chose color palettes, not singular hero colors, for 2022, both brands named similar greens in their lineups, too: Breakfast Room Green for Farrow & Ball, and Blanched Thyme for Valspar.

Since the brands usually choose different hues, what gives this year? The greens chosen are all evocative of nature and a universal focus on wellbeing—a major clue as to the genesis of the brands' paint-color selection processes this year. As the Post posits: "The prevailing theory is that a prolonged period in which we all followed similar routines—working from home, eating outside, swapping long-distance vacations for long, scenic drives—ignited a global conversation around the importance of mental health."

Or, in the words of a color expert: "To me, the fact that there’s consensus like this speaks to our shared experience," Sue Wadden, who leads color marketing at Sherwin-Williams, told the Post of the consensus color. "It’s like no other time in history."