For 2025, the colour of the year will be a living green (which is also a dying green)

A real green is easy to find. It smells like the kale I forgot in the bottom drawer of my fridge two weeks ago, now yellow at its filigreed edges. It's the colour of chlorophyll, of the wetland behind an Amazon fulfilment centre and the purple-hearted stain of crushed coleus leaves on cotton. It is the kind of green that lives and dies before your eyes. 

Earlier this year, CBC Arts asked several dozen artists and arts workers — painters, sculptors, drag queens, filmmakers, choreographers, curators and more — to predict the year ahead, including what palettes they think will dominate the contrived and natural landscapes. "Green," replied many. Lime green, olive green, earth green. Brat green, too, but also, "something more solid and reassuringly drab," said photographers Saty + Pratha. 

What makes a colour pervade our spaces, clothing, makeup, graphic and web design? Charli XCX's brat green emerged in the latter half of 2024, bleeding across the internet and into the material world. A hex code colour, it moved through our devices like the Electric Gremlin in Gremlins 2: The New Batch, sister hue to The Substance's luminous slime activator and the hornily walloped tennis ball in Challengers. It is a green for the screen, infinitely colourfast.

The questionnaire participants, by turn, seemed to highlight an appetite for colour as memento mori: a visual reminder that you will die (and probably sooner than you think). A green that is verdant in spring and mulch by fall, with all the shades between. 

Whether it is diffuse eco-grief or ongoing despair over the world news (a recent Guardian headline, for example, declaring, "Death feels imminent for 96% of children in Gaza, study finds"), every day we are unavoidably reminded of death. The dissonance between this reality and "brat summer" cannot be resolved with a colour, but it can, in flashes, bear the existence of both.

"For me, green has always been a colour that embodies life in its most raw and urgent forms," says artist Natalie King, via email. "As an Anishinaabe (Algonquin) artist, I use green to speak to a profound connection to the land, one that is both ancestral and future-oriented. The greens I use — the bright, zesty limes of queer 2S people's clothing [or] the earthy hues of summer foliage in another one of my works — are symbols of vitality and survival."

King's paintings are full of juicy green leaves that encircle the Indigenous figures who smile back from her canvases. "It's about reclaiming the power and wisdom of Anishinaabe knowledge systems that have long understood how to live in harmony with the Earth," she says. "[Green] is a colour that links past, present and future; a reminder that environmental stewardship is not just an ideal, but an integral part of our lifeways." 

In Sheila Heti's 2022 novel Pure Colour, the narrator describes standing in a garden with her father as he tells her about "hard little circular discs … shiny like a polished stone or polished jewel, but with its colour deep inside it." This was pure colour, he said. "It showed its colour on the outside, for its outside was what it was all the way through." 

I kept circling this idea of colour "all the way through" in a flower pounding workshop I did last August with Lizz Aston, an artist, educator and designer who works primarily with plants and natural pigments. Under Aston's guidance, I hammered petals and leaves onto white fabric, extracting their pure colour through the force of a rubber mallet and my own amorphous rage. 

"In natural dyeing, green is one of the hardest colours to achieve directly from plants," Aston tells me. "While the colour seems so ubiquitous and readily available in nature, chlorophyll isn't actually a dye." 

By its sun-fed nature, chlorophyll doesn't like to stay in one place, so Aston pretreats — or mordants — her fabrics with metallic salts to improve the pigments' light and colour fastness. "While the green from chlorophyll stems and leaves are still somewhat ephemeral, each of the steps has been used to capture the essence of the plant in its familiar form or expression for as long as possible," she explains. "Some of the greens may fade to yellows over time, but without mordanting, they would disappear from the cloth all together." 

There's both delicacy and hubris to working with natural dyes and pigments. Fixing them means creating a sort of holding cell for something naturally volatile (not unlike the Electric Gremlin). 

Where King paints the unalloyed greens of summer and Aston preserves them on cloth, artist Maria Simmons finds "gloomy comfort" in green ferment, making hybrid sculpture and installations with materials like reindeer lichen, dead spiders, grogged clay, potting soil and the strata of bog ecology. "Digging deep into the peat means digging into hundreds of years of history and decay," they say. "There is something peaceful about that for me."

Simmons's work luxuriates in productive rot. They create art that is ancient and new at once — like burying ceramics filled with butter in the preserving depths of a bog, "reenacting old mysterious rituals where large caches of butter have been found, still edible, but no one really knows why they were buried." 

Considering colour, Simmons anticipates the rehabilitation of Pantone 448 C, or "drab dark brown." Unofficially known as the ugliest colour in the world and often used for cigarette and tobacco packaging, they find the "colour of vices" soothing. It is also a shade straight from the bog palette. 

Simmons participated in a peat sampling semi-recently, where material was retrieved from seven metres below the surface. "That makes it approximately 7,000 years old," they tell me. And what does 7,000-year-old peat moss look like? "It was one of these deep brown-greenish colours. So, in a way, it's a very old, complex colour that requires growth and death and time to make."

Drab or otherwise, brown seems to be growing in popularity. For the first time in its 25-year history, Pantone named one — Mocha Mousse — its colour of the year. The New York Times Styles Desk says it reminds them of "everything from luxury knitwear to swamp water." In the chromatic arc of a living and dying green, brown is a necessary bass note, inclusive of both bog and Mocha Mousse. 

In Toronto, where I live, temperatures have dropped precipitously, and most of the green I now see takes the form of Christmas trees, bundled together at the side of a corner store like closed umbrellas. Even the plants that I pounded into fabric back in August have begun to turn, gilded by air. I love these colours that wear their age, barely withstanding a season. Unlike the memento mori of Baroque-era paintings, this living and dying green is not a stand-in for our own mortality, but that of the city, the land, the planet. 

"Green also speaks to the strength to continue, to heal and to thrive," says King. "It is a visual language that expresses the resilience of my people, the persistence of our cultures and the radical act of reclaiming space in a world that continues to impose colonial frameworks. Green, in this sense, is not just a colour I use in my paintings or murals — it's a call to action, a call to care for and protect the land that sustains us all." 

Green is easy to confuse with its symbols: of money, of envy, of carbon reducing companies, of "go," and, most certainly, of brat. Perhaps next year, we will see a green that changes a little every day, until, at a certain point, it can no longer be called green. One that, even as it dies, promises to return in spring, so long as there is a place for it to set its tenuous roots.