Why is the world losing color?

It's not "losing" color.

At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.

But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.

Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.

I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.

> At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.

Based purely on intuition, I want to agree with you. However, the data in the article suggests there's been a fairly consistent decrease in color of media since the 1800s. You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease, but one does not exist. At least, the "explosion" the data shows is a very minor increase that does not affect the overall pattern.

The data in the article is either not representative or didn't go back far enough.

The best example, cars, only goes back to 1990. And the museum objects are objects a science museum happened to keep, that go back to 1800? Hardly representative of consumer objects in general. There isn't even a single chart about clothing.

Glancing through historical clothing and car magazines from the past century is going to tell you a lot more.

So do you have actual own data to counter this?