Prologue. PANTONE 16–1546: Living Coral

“Pantone 16–1546 Living Coral” is an orangish-pink hue that was chosen as Pantone’s Color of the Year in 2019 (Figure 1). Pantone describes “Living Coral” as “vivifying and effervescent” and “evocative of how coral reefs provide shelter to a diverse kaleidoscope of color.”1 Like many popularizations, this description portrays coral as a rainbow signifier of tropical marine life. Yet there is a magic trick here, a subtle act of substitution: Pantone writes that coral reefs shelter color instead of fish or other reef lifeforms. As a company that “provides a universal language of color” for use in industry and design, it is not surprising to see Pantone mobilize an ecological metaphor to talk about a diversity of color, as if colors themselves were lifeforms to be conserved.

“Living Coral” is a metonym on two levels: a color that stands in for a rainbow of other colors, and an iconic coral that stands in for a multiplicity of other corals. Metonymy, the act of referring to something via one of its attributes or parts, is about substitution: for example, invoking “the stage” to indicate the theater. “Living Coral” is not only metonymic but also a type of a “global icon,” a genre of sign that Bishnupriya Ghosh reminds us “always opens to an elsewhere” in a manner analogous to a camera aperture.2 In Ghosh’s camera analogy, a change in aperture results in a change in projected image. Similarly, a change in coral species or geography may lead to a completely different kind of story about coral than those that follow from stony, tropical, and colorful reefs. “Living Coral” thus offers an occasion to consider the deeper effects of a homogenous conception of coral and its implications for environmental narratives, scientific knowledge, and mediation.

Although “Living Coral” masquerades as a global icon for all corals, it references a very particular coral—Corallium rubrum, or red coral, which has been harvested from the Mediterranean since antiquity and valued as a type of gemstone. In Greek mythology, coral was thought to originate from the blood of the decapitated Medusa’s head, dripping into the ocean, which hardened into red coral.3 Sometimes referred to as “red gold,” Corallium rubrum ranges from pale pink to dark red, and is in danger of disappearing from the Mediterranean due to overharvesting, habitat destruction, and climate change.4 What is commonly understood as the universal color “coral,” then, is indexed to Corallium rubrum rather than, say, violet coral, Hawaiian black coral, brown staghorn coral, multihued carnation coral, orange-tipped bubble coral, or coral fluorescence.5

At a time when corals around the world face a number of anthropogenic threats, it feels perverse that Pantone imagines “Living Coral” providing “comfort and buoyancy in our continually shifting environment.”6 The “shifting” environment is an understatement haunted by what it does not say—that corals are losing their ecological conditions of livability. As I write this in 2023, the world’s oceans have experienced one of the hottest summers in living record. The global average daily sea surface temperature reached 20.96 Celsius, and sea temperatures in places like the Florida coast reached over 100 Fahrenheit.7 It is no surprise, then, that the reception of Pantone’s “Living Coral” has been mixed; as journalist Christina Cauterucci writes, it “feels like a troll directed at a planet rapidly growing inhospitable to the many organisms that call it home.”8 “Living Coral” belies two kinds of dead coral: the gemstone commodity, and the reefs lost to multiple types of environmental degradation: ocean warming, coral bleaching, the pressures of ocean acidification, damage from climate-intensified storms, and other slow violences of anthropogenic climate change.9

These necropolitical contexts have motivated some to imagine a broader Pantone coral palette. Pantone partnered with the campaign “Glowing Glowing GONE” to recognize three new colors that correlate with tropical coral fluorescence, a biological phenomenon that occurs just before they bleach white from thermal stress. “Glowing Glowing GONE” markets three new shades, “Glowing Blue,” “Glowing Yellow,” and “Glowing Purple” as environmentally-conscious colors. Yet the campaign jarringly uses fluorescence to produce two different affects: the pathos of anticipating coral death, and the joy of using these colors to “design glowing products” and “create glowing events,” as if the end of the world, for corals, is a rave.10

Still, “Glowing Glowing GONE” usefully destabilizes the correlation of coral with just one iconic color. I see the iconicity of “Living Coral” as a problem because attention in the sciences, humanities, and global environmentalisms has almost exclusively focused on one kind of coral, and one kind of environment: stony corals in warm, tropical waters. This occludes a number of exceptions. Not all corals build reefs: soft corals live in warms waters come in all kinds of pastels. Cold-water corals do not have symbiotic algae (are azooxanthellate) because they live mainly in cold, deep, and/or dark waters, and thus lack the pigments brought by algal companions. Lophelia pertusa is ghostly white—or ceramic white, or milky white. Fire corals are stinging to the touch, further away in the coral family tree from those stony corals that have become so iconic. Joining them are whip corals, mushroom-shaped purple sea pansies, sea pens, and other octocorals that build life worlds far different from tropical stony corals.

There is Living Coral (PANTONE 16–1546), and a multiplicity of other corals—corals that inhabit different ecologies, have different relations to extractive industries, enable different possibilities of world-building, and disrupt an environmental media imaginary calibrated to tropical waters and inscriptive archives.

Notes

1. 1. Pantone, “Color of the Year,” https://www.pantone.com/articles/color-of-the-year/color-of-the-year-2019.

2. 2. Bishnupriya Ghosh, Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 9.

3. 3. Malcolm Shick, Where Corals Lie: A Natural and Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

4. 4. Autumn Spann, “The Mediterranean’s Red Coral Is Running Out,” https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/02/red-coral-mediterranean-fishing-climate-change/618124/.

5. 5. For example, Or Ben-Zvi, Yoav Lindemann, Gal Eyal, and Yossi Loya, “Coral Fluorescence: A Prey-Lure in Deep Habitats,” Communication Biology 5, no. 537 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03460-3.

6. 6. Pantone, “Pantone Announces the Color of the Year 2019: PANTONE® 16–1546 Living Coral,” https://www.pantone.com/articles/press-releases/pantone-announces-the-color-of-the-year-2019-pantone-16-1546-living-coral.

7. 7. “Ocean Surface Hits Highest Ever Recorded Temperature and Set to Rise Further,” The Guardian, August 4, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/04/oceans-hit-highest-ever-recorded-temperature; “101°F in the Ocean off Florida: Was It a World Record?,” The New York Times, July 26, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/climate/florida-100-degree-water.html.

8. 8. Christina Cauterucci, “The 2019 Color of the Year Is the Latest Hilarious Misfire in Pantone’s History of Awkward Wokeness Attempts,” https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/12/pantone-color-of-the-year-2019-living-coral-climate-change.html.

9. 9. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 2011).

10. 10. “Glowing, Glowing, Gone,” https://www.glowing.org/show-your-colours-challenge.