The world in between worlds - Asian Paints announces its ColourNext 2026 Forecast

ColourNext 2026 is rooted in what Rotterdam-based artist Kaoutar Gadir describes as “…the world in between worlds.” It is this liminal space of neither fully belonging nor being fully apart, where culture is actively being made today. We are living in thresholds: between hyper-digital acceleration and a longing for tactility, between ecological anxiety and regenerative optimism, between inherited craft and speculative futures. This year’s report explores how people are seeking presence over performance, revival over collapse, lineage over spectacle, and softness over severity. It is within these tensions that this year’s directions take shape.

Before we move through them, however, we pause with a single hue that captures the emotional temperature of the year ahead.

IRL: Presence as a Cultural Reclaiming

In an age of constant connectivity, IRL (In Real Life) reflects a growing recognition that presence itself has become a luxury. This direction does not reject technology, but gently recalibrates its place within our lives, privileging tactility, slowness, and shared experience over endless scroll and simulated connection. Across generations, there is a renewed appetite for gathering around tables, hosting intimate dinners, revisiting analog tools, crafting by hand, and rediscovering the pleasure of unmediated conversation. The IRL palette feels grounded and memory-washed, echoing analog textures and lived-in warmth. Materials are robust and forgiving: grain visible, stitch evident, weight tangible. Mid-century references return not as nostalgia, but as reassurance. In IRL, depth replaces throughput, and attention becomes an act of care.

Solar Punk : Regeneration as Imagination

Where IRL slows us down, Solar Punk looks forward with defiant optimism. It emerges from a refusal to accept collapse as destiny and instead imagines futures built through repair, resilience, and symbiosis. Nature and technology are no longer framed as opposites, but as collaborators in an evolving system of regeneration. Architectural experiments in biofabrication, mycelium composites, plant-dyed metals, adaptive housing, and high-performance outdoor wear signal a shift toward circular materials and structural honesty. The aesthetic is exposed, engineered, and robust, yet alive with organic intelligence.

The palette mirrors this ethos suggesting a world that feels slightly unfamiliar yet profoundly inhabitable. A future that’s not cancelled, but consciously redesigned.

Pastoral: Luxury Rooted in Lineage

Pastoral redefines luxury not through excess, but through a deliberate turning toward land, lineage, and inherited knowledge. In a culture saturated with global sameness, the hyperlocal becomes radical and provenance itself becomes a marker of status.

Indigenous weaving traditions, nomadic textiles, hand-beaten metals, ancestral dye techniques, and region-specific materials re-enter contemporary design with renewed relevance, not simply as nostalgia but as living craft. Cultural capital in this context is quiet and discerning, representing what’s embodied and unsaid rather than announced.

The palette echoes mountain passes, desert winds, ceremonial pigment, and woven fibre. In landscapes of dry deserts and cold mountains, depth replaces drama while subtlety echoes status.

Daydream: Softness as Expansion

If Pastoral grounds us, Daydream invites us to drift. Drawing from liminal aesthetics, immersive media, and the dreamlike qualities of contemporary art and cinema, this direction dissolves boundaries between clarity and fantasy. It does not offer escape, but an altered mode of presence where perception softens and imagination overlays the real. Glass re-emerges as structural poetry where surfaces morph and light behaves like mist. Interiors feel suspended rather than fixed. Multi-sensory installations, translucent materials, and atmospheric layering create environments that are felt as much as seen. The palette moves through glow and whisper, warmth and hush. It is luminous without glare, soft without fragility. Daydream asks us to linger inside ambiguity, to allow wonder to coexist with structure, and to recognise that softness can be a strategy, not a surrender.