Mocha Mousse isn’t the misspelled name of a beloved cartoon — it’s Pantone’s official Color of the Year for 2025.
Also known as Pantone 17-1230, Mocha Mousse is a light brown that evokes, well, mocha and chocolate mousse.
Why brown?
We’ve discussed how Pantone chooses its COTY before, but it’s all about charting and predicting trends in fashion and design.
- Pantone tells Fast Company that Mocha Mousse is “foundational.”
- It’s gender-neutral, not tied to a season, and pairs well with pastels and vibrant colors.
- It’s a comfort color, hence the dessert imagery.
It’s all still business
Pantone picks the color in spring so it can line up merchandise deals, The Washington Post notes.
- Pantone’s website has Mocha Mousse merch already.
- Motorola is releasing official Mocha Mousse phones, just like it did with 2024’s COTY, Peach Fuzz.
Knowing trends in advance allows the global supply chain to prepare for increased demand and reduce some guesswork, per Forbes.
Even for Pantone, it’s mostly about marketing: It claims to have 95% brand recognition in the design industry because of COTY.
What about Brat summer?
Color fans may be shocked to learn that the COTY is anything but “Brat green,” an arguably hideous shade that graced a Charli XCX album cover and became a meme unto itself.
- Pantone didn’t miss the boat on this one, it actually gave top honors to a similarly abrasive color in 2017.
- It sees the popularity of “Brat green” as proof that it correctly predicted the trend, per Fast Company.
The color was unavoidable on social media this summer, which saw restaurants selling carefully colored green drinks, an Etsy seller shipping 1k green “Charli lighters,” and sizable search increases for green cars, per NBC News — all to court virality.
Just wait until 2031, when some album with a brown cover is all the rage.
