Mocha mousse’ to plum: The nine paint colours that can transform your home

As Pantone’s “colour of the year 2025” is announced, we explore the paint shades that are trending now – and find out which colours can improve our mood.

Deciding on the colour of a room at home is a major commitment, as most of us will live with it for years or even decades. So you might think that following trends in paint colours and paint effects would be too impractical and costly to contemplate. In fact, though, paint colour trends have garnered a lot of attention lately. Domestic interiors are becoming steadily more daring in terms of colours, including vibrant and pop hues, but more commonly darker, moody, sometimes jewel-like shades. And they are hard to ignore. So what key trends are emerging and what influences are shaping them?
Bonnie Pierre-Davis, an interiors strategist with the WGSN trend-forecasting company, tells the BBC: “An interest in tinted darks has risen in previous seasons. It has been spotted on catwalks and throughout the automotive and interior product design industries, beginning with dark blues and now shifting towards purples… Consumers are slowly growing confident with this colour on walls for its therapeutic quality.”
Confirmation that certain colours are on-trend comes from all areas of culture, according to Carinna Parraman. “In the current series of Strictly Come Dancing (the UK TV version of Dancing with the Stars), the dancers’ costumes are deep plum, purples, dark teak, yellow and green.” Parraman is professor of design, colour and print at the Centre for Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, where she organises an ongoing series of online lectures on colour.