Could Behr’s bizarre Climate Change paint be the real colour of the year?

We were quick to poke fun when Pantone declared its colour of the year 2025 to be Mocha Mousse. But at least the icky hue sounds more palatable than it looks. When it comes to selling colours, the usual convention is to give hues evocative poetic names the elicit positive feelings, not the death of a planet.

So why does the paint brand Behr have a moss-tinged white called Climate Change? It’s been five years since people first noticed it, and there’s still no explanation, although Home Depot appears to have now removed the hue from its website amid the controversy.

Behr describes its Climate Change paint hue as an “icy green-gray with a tonal richness”. That sounds nice enough, but why connect it with a global environmental crisis?

Paints companies usually put a lot of thought into choosing names and, and the choices have to be approved by multiple people, including public relations and lawyers to the check the name doesn’t haven negative connotations and isn’t being used by another brand.

Climate Change doesn’t appear to be part of an initiative to donate to conservation charities, for instance, nor part of a campaign to make more sustainable paints.

The hue has a warmth to it. Perhaps Behr wanted to suggest that the shade can make interiors feel warmer and it was somehow oblivious to the fact that the term ‘climate change’ already has another, catastrophically negative meaning. Or maybe it’s an ironic riposte to Benjamin Moore’s similar Glacier White,which is not the colour of any glacier I’ve ever seen.

Or perhaps we’re supposed to make a connection with Behr’s polar bear logo. Is it a warning to the world about the plight of the species as its habitat melts, the pristine white ice turning to a green-grey slush? If that’s the aim pehaps Climate Change white should be the real colour of the year; a true colour for our times.

It seems strange that if Behr wanted to make a statement it didn’t provide an explanation. Climate Change is buried away in a library of over 4,000 colours with no explanation, and the name makes it seem as if Behr thinks climate change is a good thing.

“Climate Change” seems like a really scary name for a paint chip of a wispy, moss-tinted white that would look great in my bathroom,” someone wrote on Reddit five years ago. “Is this about polar bears darkening their coats because of declining sea ice?”, Zoë Schlanger, a writer at the Atlantic wondered back in 2022.

Home Depot appears to have stopped stocking the colour, but it’s still listed on the Behr website.

Not the right shade for your project? See our guide to colour theory for pointers.