Clariant released its new Automotive Styling Shades 2025 Trendbook, including an interactive digital version for the first time.
The Trendbook, published every two years, highlights how globalization has made color preference more uniform worldwide than it was 20 years ago, with white still the most preferred shade in 2020 rounding off 10 years of uninterrupted dominance. Yet, as people around the globe look for joy, beauty and cultural sharing after the impacts of the pandemic color is back in the air.
“The 2025 edition is focused on ‘color meets culture’, exploring the inspiration and emotion that color brings to our lives and forecasting brilliant shades and metallic effects in a diverse range of color families,” said Bernhard Stengel-Rutkowski, technical manager Automotive Coatings at Clariant.
These are Daily Relaunch – with mood-lifting hues for the office commute, Value-based Culture – gentle colors for a peaceful and sustainable co-existence on the planet, The Fast and the Curious – shades that shout open-mindedness and self-confidence, and Rainbow Bridge – bold colors that blaze a trail and refuse to follow the rules.
Pushing the boundaries of traditional formulation knowledge, Clariant’s organic pigments are helping to solve some of the coatings formulation challenges posed by new, disruptive technologies. These include how to improve near infrared reflectance to make dark cars detectable by LIDAR technology, essential for the safety of autonomous vehicles, or the formulation of brilliant shades when metallic effect pigments are combined with colored organic pigments.
For the first time, Clariant is launching a virtual version of the Trendbook along with the brand-new online and interactive Car Color Configurator, offering customers a collection of 28 new trend shades for automotive coatings.
“The trend colors can be virtually selected and applied onto different car models, from a sports car to a family van, and viewed in settings that include neutral scenery, a sunset, an urban landscape or with infrared vision. This was made possible by scanning a painted panel and converting the data into a format that is compatible with common rendering software. The Car Color Configurator allows customers to collect their favorites in a personal brochure without the need to share personal data,” Stengel-Rutkowski said.
