What is mocha mousse, Pantone’s colour of the year, and do I eat it or wear it?

Mocha mousse, Pantone’s colour of 2025 and here in a cosmetic highlighter with shimmer, is basically ‘brown with a solid glug of cream mixed through it’. Photograph: Anastasiia Bidzilia/Getty Images/iStock

Alyx, I hear that Pantone has announced the colour of 2025. What is it?

Every year colour company Pantone declares one shade to rule them all. Sometimes it’s a disastrous misfire: this year they picked “peach fuzz”, then slime green – which is several steps removed on the colour wheel – dominated the discourse. Sometimes they’re right on the money, like when they picked “Big Tech blue” just before the Covid-19 pandemic forced us all to live through screens.