Living Coral: Vital, Vibrant, and Warm

CEBU, Philippines — Coral is an interestingly complex life form. While it resembles a plant, it is actually an animal. It looks like a single organism, but in reality it is formed by a huge number of individual elements, living in colonies, closely connected to each other.

Sadly, corals are now in serious threat at two sides – by human abuse of the seas and oceans, and by climate change. It is only timely that the Pantone Color Institute, the world’s leading authority in the field of color identification and classification, has chosen Living Coral as the “Color of the Year” for 2019. The choice is hopefully going to direct public attention to the plight of the corals.

Since 2000, when Pantone started selecting the ‘color of the year’, the choice has always been driven by an attempt to embody the spirit of the timeand, simultaneously, to launch a message of hope.Coral, a very fragile organism that is at serious risk due to water pollution, also represents the vitality of the marine world. Thus, the shade is called Living Coral.

The website www.italianshoes.com quotes LeatriceEiseman, the executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, as saying that Living Coral is also “a color capable of uniting the two worlds in which we are immersed, the natural and the digital worlds.” It is a bright, warm color, which also refers to the 50s and 60s and to a simpler life.

In terms of fashion andinterior design, Coral is also very adaptable to multiple combinations and perfectly matching many shades of materials. Hence, it can be expected that designers – of fashion and other products – are going to vigorously use the color in their creations. Living Coral is indeed a sensible choice.

Vittorio Giovanni Rossi, a Genoese journalist and writer, as well as a seafarer, once wrote:“Coral has the beauty of the rose, the color of blood, the clarity of a crystal, the heat of fire.” There are many types of coral and even more shades that it can take, from the most pale to the most intense, depending on the type, the area, the growth stage.