Purple, color of the year 2022

Pantone, the U.S. brand with the famous color chart, chose Very Peri Purple as its color of the year 2022. According to Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, “By encompassing the qualities of blues with a touch of red-purple, [this purple] expresses a bright and joyful attitude and dynamic presence that encourages creativity and imaginative expression.”

The unveiling of Pantone’s color of the year is an event for decorating world, so don’t be surprised if you see this Very Peri purple blooming all over interiors in 2022 !

This is the first time Pantone didn’t choose the color of the year from its colors chart. Very Peri Purple was created especially for this occasion, as a reflection of “the worldwide innovation and transformation” and “a symbol of the global spirit.”  We are living through an exceptional period marked by the pandemic – multiple confinements, social distancing measures, teleworking… – this purple is both comforting and daring.

Purple in history

For a long time, purple was a color reserved for royalty, nobles and clergy. The reason is simple : it was very expensive to produce a deep purple pigment able of dyeing clothes, such as Tyre purple.

To obtain a few grams of Tyrian purple, tens of thousands of spiny murexes, mollusks related to sea snails, had to be shredded.

You may wonder why people didn’t just crush purple fruits to obtain purple dye? Who has ever eaten blueberry pie while wearing white shirt, knows the coloring power of these purple berries! You see, if blueberries can indeed dye a fabric, the dye does not last, it fades with the sun and washing.

That’s all nice, but everyone knows – and we’ve said it before – purple is a mixture of blue and red. Why not just mix blue and red to get a nice purple? Because the blues you could get at that time were closer to blue-green, and the reds tinged with orange. When you mix blue-green with red-orange, you don’t get purple, but an unappetizing brown!

We had to wait till the end of the 19th century and mauvine industrialization for purple being accessible to everyone. Mauvine is a color discovered accidentally by the English chemist William Henry Perkin in 1856.

RISO’s Purple

Take a look at big printing firms logos : you’ll see a huge majority of red and blue. But not at RISO.

RISO’s color is purple. In a world made of red and blue, RISO asserts its difference, its outsider status, its originality with purple. For RISO, purple is also the expression of its ability to think out of the box, to innovate and to experiment.

“RISO is not a company like others and this can be felt at all levels, in our products as well as in the way we interact with our customers, or supporting our employees…, says Véronique Jal, marketing director at RISO France. Our singularity and creativity are expressed by several ways and they are reflected even in our emblematic color: purple.”