Clariant, one of the world's most renowned pigment manufacturers, has released its new Automotive Styling Shades 2025 Trend Book, including a first-ever interactive digital version.
The highly anticipated biennial trend book highlights the increasingly uniform color preferences worldwide compared to 20 years ago as a result of globalization. After a decade of uninterrupted dominance, white is still the most popular color in 2020. But as people around the world yearn for cheerfulness, beauty and cultural exchange as a result of the pandemic, color is coming back into play.
"The 2025 edition has the motto 'Color meets culture'. It explores the inspirations and emotions that color triggers in our lives and offers a preview of brilliant shades and metallic effects in a diversified palette of color families," says Bernhard Stengel-Rutkowski, Technical Manager Automotive Coatings at Clariant. The trend book summarizes the colors in four groups: Daily Relaunch - with mood-lifting shades for office commuters; Value-based Culture - soft colors for peaceful and sustainable coexistence on this planet; The Fast and the Curious - shades that proclaim open-mindedness and self-confidence; and Rainbow Bridge - bold colors that blaze a trail and challenge rules.
Clariant's organic pigments push the boundaries of conventional formulation techniques and help solve some of the challenges of automotive coatings application posed by new, disruptive technologies. These include improving reflection in the near-infrared range to enable the detection of dark vehicles with LIDAR technology - fundamental for the safety of autonomous vehicles - or formulating brilliant shades by combining metallic effect pigments with organic color pigments.
Color at the click of a mouse
For the first time, Clariant is also publishing a virtual version of the Trend Book with a completely new, interactive Car Color Configurator that introduces customers to the collection of 28 innovative trend colors for automotive coatings.
"The trend colors can be virtually selected and applied to different types of vehicles, from sports cars to family vans. The vehicles, in turn, can be viewed in a variety of environments, including in a background (Neutral), at sunset, in an urban environment (Urban), under a blue sky (Bright) or at dusk (Diffuse)," explains Stengel-Rutkowski. "This was made possible by scanning a painted metal panel in such a way that the data is compatible with common rendering software. The Car Color Configurator also makes it possible to compile preferred scenarios in a personal brochure without having to provide any personal data."
With the introduction of this modern tool, Clariant has combined its expertise in formulating pigments and colors with insights from trend research and makes the resulting shades available digitally.
