The Pantone Color of the Year for 2026 was released, and I got to talk to you about it.

It's white.

I mean, it's called Cloud Dancer, but it's white.

And sometimes I look around and I feel like the whole world is just slowly being desaturated.

If you look at logos, they've lost their personality.

It's just these sans serif typefaces and they're smooth and predictable and just perfectly neutral restaurants.

Oh, my gosh.

They used to have, you know, Reds and yellows and, and now it looks like they were all like inspired by upscale cardboard and cars, you know, would you like black, white, Gray?

Oh, do you want that courageous beige color?

It's just, it's, I don't know, I'm noticing it.

And then there's the sad beige mom trend.

Have you seen this on TikTok?

So the nurseries are just full of oatmeal colored toys and taupe walls.

And it's kind of beautiful in a way, but it's eerie.

Someone described it as the aesthetic equivalent of whispering and that if that's exactly it.

And in a way, it makes me wonder, are we craving calm, or are we conditioning ourselves to avoid anything that feels like too alive or too vibrant or too unpredictable?

And of course, my brain jumps to dogs because apparently that's my default mode these days.

And I think about how often we treat our dogs the same way we treat color.

Something to mute, something to to tone down and to make more predictable.

I've seen people label over arousal and really it was just joy.

And we call enthusiasm a behavior problem.

A lot of times we're like, like with clay, you know, we round off the edges and we do that with medication.

And if I asked Pantone for like the good dog color palette, I would not be surprised if it looks an awful, like, a lot like that kind of beige nursery look.

So the question that's been sitting on top for me, what are these colors trying to tell us about who we've been and who we're becoming?

And how does that show up in the way that we live and train and let ourselves feel?

Hey, friends, I'm Crystal Wing and this is what's on top.

It's a place to chase curiosity with me, Mama.

Oh, always asking what's on top.

And that's where we started this.

Whatever is sitting at the front of my brain today, whatever is hanging out on top and around here, I embrace curiosity and the connections between dog training, humans, being human, and the random life stuff that somehow ties back to our dogs like Pantone colors.

Sometimes it's a short reflection.

I'm aiming for 10 to 15 minutes.

We'll see.

Sometimes it's something my dogs teach me, and sometimes it's a conversation with someone whose brain I love to explore.

There's no big production here over editing, just my dogs and me sharing what's on top today.

So what does the Pantone color of 2026 have to do with dog training?

Well, kind of everything and absolutely nothing at the same time.

It's just my brain.

I'm always seeing these connections to what I've already been feeling.

And I've been feeling this for a while.

And I'm guessing you're probably not a Pantone aficionado.

So a quick kind of outline of what this means.

Pantone's color of the year.

It, it's not really about the color at all.

It's, it's a mirror.

It's like the the pulse of what's going on around us.

They're predicting what we're going to crave as a collective.

And Pantone doesn't just pick a color because it's pretty.

Believe me, that's not the whole purpose.

This year.

It's white, for goodness sake.

So it's not about the pretty.

When I saw the announcement this morning, I just made that sound of just I was an art teacher for 23 years and every year about this time, I loved chatting with the kids and they would announce the next color and then we would have so much conversation about color theory and symbolism.

And 2024 was Peach fuzz.

This is a podcast.

You can't see the color, describe it.

If Peach fuzz were a feeling, it would be the moment when a dog leans their full weight onto your leg and you just soften.

It's warm but not bright, and it's gentle, but not like the fragile kind of gentle, you know, it's it's the inside of a seashell or the soft of a cheek.

It's it's just a color that you feel more than you see.

So 2024 was this beautiful color that we had a lot of discussion about.

And then 2025, the kids kind of joked that looked like poop, but it was called Mocha moose.

OK, how do I describe Mocha Moose?

If it were a feeling, it would be the weight of your dog curling against you after a long day and not asking for anything but just settling in next to a fireplace.

You know, it would be the moment that you wrap both your hands around a warm mug and you know when your shoulders drop, but you didn't tell them to.

It's that kind of exhale that you didn't realize that you were holding on to.

That's that's what I when I see Mocha Moose, that's what I see.

2026.

I was surprised maybe half a second.

It's Cloud Dancer.

It's white.

Oh boy.

OK, let me describe that one.

If cloud dancer were a feeling OK, it would be the touch of fresh linen, that kind of smooth and cool.

It would be an invitation more than an instruction because I'm thinking of, like, the clean slate, the clean paper.

OK, when we relate to dogs, all I can see is my sweet Dutchie Yukon, his blank stare.

And he does this little blink, blink.

So he's like, ready but kind of clueless.

So that's, I guess, my best description of those colors.

And OK, back to Pantone.

How did they come up with these colors?

So they gathered trend data.

They look at fashion and interiors.

They look at psychology, they're looking at the world events and marketing, any economic shifts, even what people click on.

So it is way more than just a pretty color.

It's a cultural snapshot.

You know what?

It's like a mood ring.

It's a humanity mood ring.

That's what it is.

And they chose white for this upcoming year.

So when the world chooses a soft white like cloud dancer, that's not an accident.

There's a lot of factoring going into it.

So what does that say about us?

White is kind of the ultimate neutral.

It's control, but it's also a reset, that blank slate.

What I'm hearing is don't overwhelm me.

And I can't hold one more thing.

So it's either a blank page that you can't mess up, or it's a restart that you needed that blank page to start over.

And it's just a clean slate.

And I think it's for a lot of people, when the world starts to feel really loud, they need that cleanliness.

But there's a cost to that when everything's turning white and Gray and black.

I mean, look at our cars.

I was born in 1978.

Our cars were green.

I grew up with a yellow Pinto, and we had a yellow :) on the dash.

And my first car was a blue Trans Am with a big bird on the hood.

I mean, that was color.

Restaurants go to McDonald's.

It has a red roof.

It has a bright yellow arches.

It's color inside, red and yellow.

And there's Ronald in there, you know, waiting for you to sit next to him on the bench.

Taco Bell man, when I was a kid, it was purple and orange.

The booths were all like, brightly painted with the big bell.

Houses had color.

OK.

My bedroom, my parents as a kid, they let me paint my bedroom.

I had pink walls and a purple ceiling.

Do I have that now?

Oh heck no.

I have this boring green Gray taupe main room.

I have white appliances, a black countertop.

Now my office is a light blue and the other two rooms are white.

The bathroom though, is goldfish.

It's delightful.

It's as delightful as it sounds.

It really makes you look pretty.

That just like a beautiful skin tone.

I think other things.

When I was a teacher, we had a print shop at school.

And what color did the main clothing come in?

Well, we did black on black, so we did black puff for the basketball team on black shirts.

Most of the orders were white and black shirts or grey.

And lately I've been thinking about what would shift if we started kind of instead of obsessing over how things appear, we paid closer attention to how they actually feel.

Because my childhood pink and purple room, it did not match anything in a design magazine.

But you know what it felt like?

It felt like joy.

And my coral bathroom, my goldfish bathroom, it's the one color that I really held onto.

It makes me smile every time I walk in.

And I'm not saying that neutrals are the problem.

And I'm not saying that calm is the enemy.

But I do think we've drifted so far toward this quiet that we've forgotten how to let things be vibrant or, or messy.

And that's an important thing with dog training.

We're we're not letting things be bold.

We're so uptight about mistakes and having any messy training.

We got to be perfect the first Rep and have the recipe so the behaviors happen perfectly errorlessly, no deviation.

It's this straight line of progress, dude.

That's not how it works.

It's like scribbles.

And maybe that's why dogs feel like a breath of fresh air for me.

They bring their own color, their their own aliveness.

They're they're so saturated.

They're bright.

They don't worry about, you know, matching the cabinets.

And I wish we could borrow a little of that.

And not just in our homes, but in how we choose, how we train, how we live.

I want more of the feeling, more of the color that makes us feel like ourselves again.

And I wonder, is this all a sign that we're kind of collectively avoiding intensity and in the unpredictable because we're avoiding color, because I think we're essentially avoiding emotion.

And maybe that's too big of a jump, but just go with me for a minute because this is where I think the dog world overlaps.

We've done the same thing with our dogs.

We've muted them.

We've labeled joy as over arousal.

Energy is too much.

And I've seen so many people that are like, oh, enthusiasm, we got to fix it.

And it's like we're, we're, we're designing a living room instead of a relationship.

I kind of like that.

I need to write that down.

Have you guys followed Elise Myers?

She's a, a social media influencer and something that she says that I absolutely love and relate to.

And she says something like, if I'm too much, then go find less.

And maybe the Pantone color is just a reflection of that same kind of cultural swing.

We're finding less, or maybe it's a signal of what we wish we felt.

One of my favorite lessons when I was teaching was color theory and specifically the psychology of color.

So if I'm thinking about white, it symbolizes, in the West, purity.

But in some East Asian cultures, it's a color of mourning, of grieving.

We can look at it as purity and innocence or emptiness and isolation.

Some see it as new beginnings and cleanliness and health.

And others see it as, you know, being sterile and cold and perfectionism and being critical.

And then others say that white is the ultimate color of peace and neutrality.

Neutrality.

You know what that gets talked about a lot.

It's like the gold standard.

You know, it's the goal that we should be striving for, you know, the, the Gray walls and the white cars and the beige everything, You know, calm dogs, quiet houses, tidy emotions.

Yeah, you guys, I walked through a dorm.

This was a couple years ago now, but it was shocking the difference from when I was in college.

And I know, like I said, I taught art for 23 years.

It was a couple days ago when I was in college, but we had music playing.

We had our doors open.

People were, you know, going from room to room.

And when I walked through the hall, it was Airpods and silence with most of the doors closed and the doors that were open, there was no sound.

And I even notice, you know, go to restaurant and the families at restaurants, the kids are silent, you know, and, and they're mainly on devices.

It's, it's just such a shift in my lifetime.

And it's about quiet and, and peace.

And actually, I don't think it's about neutrality and peace because I see them differently.

Neutrality for me is like the absence of, of disturbance.

It's when you remove the noise and peace is, is presence, it's safety because peace lets you hear yourself again.

And those are not the same thing.

So neutrality, I think it's kind of asking you nothingness, it's to be kind of shut down.

And I think peace is welcoming and it's it's letting you kind of settle in.

And then dog training, Woo Hoo.

This difference matters.

I think about a neutral dog.

They're not necessarily a peaceful dog.

Now they can be, but it doesn't mean they are.

Sometimes they're just holding everything in because they don't feel safe enough to to really show who they are.

And their energy is low, not because they're calm, but because they've learned that expressing themselves, they're, they're going to get some pressure and some conflict.

A peaceful dog, though, that's different.

Peace looks like a dog.

They can.

They can breathe in their body.

As my friend Joanie says, they finally inhabit their own body.

And so many dogs don't quite have that ability.

We were actually joking about because her young lab didn't know he had a back like back legs at all yet.

But it still fits because peace is when you inhabit your body and it is your own, a dog who can.

I'll go back to the color reference.

They can show their colors and they can manage the intensity of those colors.

They can express the joy and then they can settle.

To me, that's peace.

It's that balance between expression and regulation.

I'm picturing neutrality as silence and peace as harmony.

Oh, I like that because my class right now that I'm teaching is called training and harmony because harmony needs color.

It needs movement and it needs all the pieces that vibrancy and the softness and then the clarity, It's all working together.

And I think This is why Cloud Dancer, this year's color being white, it just got me thinking so much because white looks like neutrality, like nothingness.

But true peace is not blank.

It's safe.

And it's safe enough that you could add color and and not feel overwhelmed by it.

And that's what dogs teach us when we're paying attention.

So peace is not stripping away excitement.

It's when they can be themselves and you too.

And I think that peace is helping them move through excitement and return to center.

I mean, I think that's what we're always doing.

As a student and art and teacher of art history, I've always seen that culture lives on a pendulum or a swing.

When you study art history long enough, you start to see the swing everywhere.

Culture swings, aesthetic swing, belief swing.

There's realism to abstraction to minimalism to maximalism, and it's all back again.

And it's never a straight line.

There's always a return, a reaction, a rebellion, A remembering.

And honestly, I feel like we're sitting in one of those kind of cultural swings.

It's where it's happening right now.

And it's because the world, maybe this is me, right?

I'm just talking from my perspective, but it, it feels over stimulating and an unpredictable and loud.

And I know I just said I went to the dorm and it's quiet, but it's a different kind of loud.

It's an internal loud.

So we retreat into minimalism, the neutrals, the cleanliness, the simplicity, and, and we see it as calm.

And then I feel like we wake up and everything looks the same and we realize that we've sanitized ourselves into this numbness that is like an anesthetic.

I'm trying to get that word like the that clean thing when you clean the room.

I can't think of it now.

I think it's time we start craving color again.

And I think the swing is going to move again.

And the exact same thing happens in dog training.

There was that old extreme of, of harshness and force and compulsion that was that really rigid kind, you know, where people would see that fear, you know, and they would see that reliability was happening.

And it was really just fear.

And then we have the the swing and people reject that harm and they started leaping toward kindness.

And then we get a new extreme.

And that's the plus RE.

And it's unlimited choice and no boundaries and ends up being no clarity.

And it's where kindness becomes confusing and compassion is permissive.

But the people on both sides are full of compulsion toward each other because they're gripping so hard to that swing up at the highest point on both sides of this, like so-called fence that we have.

We, we, we let go only when we feel safe enough to move toward the center.

And we find the center only when we feel safe enough to let go.

Can can you picture this?

You're like, you're on a swing like, like, not the like a little swing, but like a playground swing, like the chain kind where you can really get up there and you can, you can get some height.

And at that furthest point of the arc, your, your body is lifting and like my stomach flips when I hit that spot.

And instinctively, you're going to tighten your grip on the chains.

And that is not the place where letting go is is going to.

I mean, it's possible, but you're going to get hurt.

It's too, it's too risky.

Now picture the middle of the swing that that's that lowest part where the where the seats gliding through the center and you feel the ground under you again.

And that's where you can soften your grip.

And you do it without even noticing it, without thinking about it.

And that's where you can let go.

I really feel like we can only release those old habits and those old fears and those old patterns when we feel safe enough to move away from those extremes and closer to the stable ground.

But we can only reach that stable ground when we start to re loose our, our tightest grips on, on the fear that keeps us stuck at the edges.

Heck, I, I don't know what that fear is.

I'm not at those edges, I don't think.

But when you're overwhelmed or or over aroused or overstressed, man, you, you cling tighter.

I, I know I've done that before, but that clinging tighter, it keeps you in that very overwhelmed that you're trying to get out of.

And, and when you move toward that place that feels safer and calmer, that's when you can let go.

And when your body is able to let go, you can move towards safety more easily.

It's this feedback loop.

So in dog training terms, a dog cannot let go of the toy when they're at the extremes of their arousal.

But they can't reach this lower arousal state if we're adding more pressure or frustration or control.

And as a handler, we, we really can't loosen, you know, our expectations if we're standing in the most anxious place, but you can't find a calmer place if you never loosen even a little.

I've been really focused on clarity lately, probably because that's week 3 and I'm teaching a class right now about the 6C's, and the third week is clarity, and I'm seeing the difference it's making when I focus on it.

But clarity creates safety, and in this example, the safety creates the ability to let go, and the letting go creates access to the clarity.

So see how it's all a swing, Everything's that swing.

And in the middle, in the place of the pendulum in the swing, it's always trying to find, even if it overshoots it a dozen times, if you push that swing and just let it go, after a while it finds the middle.

And I think Brené Brown, I love what she brings to it.

Week 1 of class is kind of coming to an end.

And the theme or the concept we're going to call it for this week has been compassion.

And what I love that she shared for Thoughtful Thursday is that what do the most compassionate people have in common?

And she thought it would be faith.

But what she found is that it's boundaries.

The people that have the most compassion are the ones that can set boundaries, and they can also follow and accept boundaries.

So just like the swing, neither extreme, it is where letting go or learning or connection happens and connection that that's Week 2.

But that growth, it's happening as you move toward the center.

And there's this relationship where if the dog and the handler too, if if you hear and you see each other, then you can guide them and you use the expectations and the boundaries.

But the world keeps swinging between extremes.

And the color and the dogs and the compassion, that's what all points us back to the same kind of goal, the same, the same truth and the center.

That's where the change actually happens.

I'm actually thinking about something, thinking about the swing.

I wonder where Ruffland colors would be, You know what I'm talking about.

You know, they're almost like, you know, they're almost like a Pantone color in, in it like a miniature, like a small cultural kind of sample because they're seasonal and they're limited and they're very expressive.

And when a color is rare or discontinued, people like go nuts.

And I, I wonder and I know there's, you know, product demand that kind of thing, but also I wonder because anything with personality feels like a tiny act of, of defiance almost.

You know, you buy the fun color, the the crate instead of the, the neutral.

And you're kind of saying, you know, I want color in my life.

And I wonder, you know, it's like really jeweled type colors.

We haven't seen them before, but even, you know, the bright leashes, the the neon biothane, all of these harnesses, Oh my gosh, they're so spectacular.

They're the rainbow tug toys.

All of these things are putting on our dogs.

I wonder if they're all doing something similar.

They're like little sparks of individuality and it it might actually be a rebellion.

I'm kind of excited about this thought or maybe a reclaiming.

Ah, see, it's that swing in action, like I talked about earlier with the art history, because people, they're not putting emerald and turquoise and hot pink on their dogs because it's practical now, maybe hunter orange, it's hunting season, but you know, you get it.

But really they're doing it because it feels like joy.

It it feels like it feels like life.

We're just alive.

And that's what I love about our dogs.

It's just something that doesn't apologize for taking up space.

And maybe the cloud dancer White will hopefully help push us to crave color, you know, to remember that we're still human and still alive and still capable of feeling something vibrant.

I think dogs, you know, become one of the few places where color is still allowed.

But also, let's flip it in training, I feel like we often try to scrub out, you know, their, their metaphorical color, you know, they're, they're, they move too much, they're too loud.

We take away their sparkle and their zoomies and their opinions.

Maybe we accessorize them with brightness and expect them to be very grayscale.

Like if they had a mood board, it'd just be all Gray.

So no wonder, you know, I'm, I'm feeling this, this dissonance.

It's it just doesn't feel great.

Maybe that color on the outside is what's we're trying to kind of compensate for the color that that we're not allowing them to be on the inside.

Speaking of dogs and color, what are your dogs colors?

Please tell me not the only one.

I know I'm not my Yukon, my Dutchie.

He's neon green.

And I chose that because it's just bright.

And I see him as maybe not bright as an intelligent, but he's just he he's he's electric.

He's he's a little mischievous and and you cannot ignore him.

So I think neon green is so great.

Checkmate.

Well, he's white, black and red.

It's check board energy.

And then rad, she's red and green because rad stands for radish.

And I just see that as really earthy and spicy.

It's, you know, red and green.

It's a radish.

And I know I'm not the only one who sees their dogs this way.

Yeah.

I think if you ask a lot of dog people, they'll they'll tell you the same thing.

Their dog has a color or a whole palette.

Sometimes it's it's literal, like the collars, the leashes, everything.

And sometimes it's more like a feeling, a mood and energy.

It's funny to me in a world that feels like it's shifting toward beige.

Everything our dogs, they still carry their saturation it that intensity, how bright that color is.

They bring the color right into the room with them.

And they don't tone themselves down to to match the furniture.

They don't try to be neutral.

They're just themselves.

Oh, and I love that about them.

And maybe that's why they stand out so much.

And, and they're such a huge part of our culture.

We keep, you know, nudging toward all of this muted palette and, and quieter aesthetics.

But I know my dogs remind me something that I'm just starving for.

And that's vibrancy, the realness.

They make the world feel less washed out.

And maybe that's why bright colors and neon biothane and limited edition Rufflin, you know, they, they feel like tiny rebellions because we're not just decorating our dogs.

We're we're acknowledging their color.

You know, I think we're saying, I, I see you, buddy.

I feel who you are.

And I want us to keep that brightness.

I do wonder what would shift if we do let ourselves do the same.

If, if we let our color show, if, if we let our energy kind of glow out there, let a little vibrancy back into spaces.

They're just, it's so quiet.

And maybe the dogs have been showing us the way the whole time.

And I love that about them thinking about white.

Did you know that white light isn't actually empty?

It's so full of potential.

It holds all the wavelengths of color.

Think prism.

When the light goes to the prism and see that ROYGBIV kind of expand out.

It's just waiting for permission to show off.

And it's just like our dogs.

And maybe that's why this Pantone Color of the Year announcement has inspired me to yap for this long.

Oh, I went way longer than I wanted to.

I know my friends are going to laugh at me.

I'm like, Oh yeah, like 10 minutes.

Oh my God.

I just went off on a tangent.

But here's the thing.

It's not because Cloud Dancer is white.

It's because white is the color of a blank page.

And I can also see it being full of potential and full of everything that could be.

And maybe that's just the optimist in me, but I'm going to share it that way.

If something here made you think or feel or want to go play or spend time with your dog, I'd love if you shared it with a friend.

If you're curious about learning with me, I'm teaching at Finzi Dog Sports Academy and we're currently I'm teaching a class about the six CS and it's harmony and training.

But we just ended the first week on compassion.

And next is connection, clarity, confidence, curiosity, and creativity and how these concepts make us better trainers.

I'm really enjoying this class.

I'm so glad I'm doing it.

If you'd like to join us, I'd love to see you there.

You can find more info in the show notes or go to Finzi Dog Sports Academy.

You can find me over on Facebook or Instagram at CBK 9.

That's CBK the number 9 or Crystal CB wing.

And until next time, keep chasing curiosity and ask yourself what's on top.