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12 hours ago
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It’s not that 39-year-old Mina Tran wants a life completely devoid of bright colours. She just doesn’t want them anywhere near her home or her children’s wardrobes. “You can’t avoid them,” says the doctor and mother of three from Texas. “They creep into areas of my life that I can’t control. You go outside and the grass is green.”
Nor can she prevent her children from growing up and developing their own taste, or family members buying things for them in brash reds and blues, or her husband dressing them – and it gives her no pleasure to recount this – “in colourful stuff from Amazon without me knowing”. But for now, in the small areas of her life that she has sway over, Tran dreams in taupe and fawn, parchment and bisque.
She is an unabashed “sad beige mum” – a woman determined to keep the garish implements of childhood at bay, and instead foster a sober palette of beige-on-beige. “You won’t see my kids in primary or secondary colours unless it’s pyjamas,” says Tran. Polychromatic plastic toys? Forget about it. A Technicolour playroom, even? “We have one play area and that play area is also the living space. I don’t want to stare at something hot pink and neon green every day,” she says. So that is also a resounding no.
She’s far from alone. Whether they’re swapping tips on shopping for austere toys or offering tours of their offspring’s luxurious nurseries, sad-beige mums abound on social media. Given their moniker by librarian Hayley DeRoche, who sent up “Werner Herzog’s” playbook of drab children’s clothing in a series of satirical TikToks, sad-beige mums are not to blame; they are just a sub-group of the sad-beige creep that has been edging its way into our algorithms – and our shopping baskets – for years.
“It’s a look that’s all over Instagram,” says Isabelle Gregory, the 25-year-old owner of a beige-on-beige home in Hampshire. “There is a fresh and clean feel to it.” Kim Kardashian was an early adopter, with her $60m “minimal monastery” with cavernous neutral-hued spaces and scant evidence of any human habitation. Former Love Island star Molly-Mae Hague’s Molly Maison is a red wine drinker’s nightmare, while Meghan Markle’s new Netflix show, With Love, Meghan, contains a litany of beige – from personalised candles to flowers.
“People my age are really influenced by what’s on social media,” says Gregory, who works in education. “And if that’s what everyone’s going for online, then that’s just what a lot of people will tend to pick up.”
“‘Sad beige’ is spot on for me, because that’s what I feel when I see it,” says Keith Recker, a trend forecaster and colour specialist. “From a zeitgeist point of view, I think beige is a retreat from prevailing narratives.” That is to say, politics, war and imminent climate catastrophe. “It’s a neutral zone – you don’t have to take a stand. It’s conservative.” And it’s not going away any time soon: Pantone’s 2025 colour of the year is mocha mousse, a shade described as “warming” and “imbued with richness” but which, to the untrained eye, could look like brown. At the spring/summer 25 menswear shows, neutral stone shades were up 155% on last year, while neutrals were the third most popular colour mix on the womenswear catwalk – behind black and white – according to trend forecaster WGSN.
Only the most entrenched maximalists are exempt from the sad-beige pull. I write this wearing a beige (technically “cappuccino”) jumper. My Ikea sofa is the colour of an overcast day. I recently reasoned, while shopping for a dress, that I should opt for a neutral colour, all the better to match the rest of my already quite beige wardrobe. It is difficult, to paraphrase Martin Amis, to resist being a leaf in the wind of trend and fashion.
Last April, the great beigification reached new heights when influencer Sydney Gifford brought legal action against fellow influencer Alyssa Sheil, alleging that Sheil had appropriated her aesthetic. Both women are evangelists of the all-neutral look; both live in a world where everything is beige and clean and shoppable via an Amazon affiliate link.
Sheil says she associates her look with the “clean girl” aesthetic – a TikTok invention synonymous with Hailey Bieber’s hair and Sofia Richie’s radiant complexion. “If you looked it up, you would see a lot of slicked-back buns, gold hoops, girls doing pilates – all of those things that I do pretty much every day and that I really resonate with,” says the 21-year-old Texan. Her house, too, is a reflection of her wardrobe: lots of wood and cement in varying beige tones. “My boyfriend will try to make a piece of toast and there’ll be, like, a single crumb and I’m already wiping it away before he finishes eating,” she says. They do an hour of chores every night after eating, and a deep clean on Sunday – a “Sunday reset”, in TikTok vernacular. How does she feel about having the accusation of being sad and beige levelled against her? “Pretty neutral.”
Joa Studholme, a colour advisor for Farrow & Ball, thinks the proliferation of beige is a reaction to grey – sometimes dubbed “millennial grey” thanks to its association with a generation of renters out of ideas. “Five years ago, any kind of warmth was frowned upon,” she says. “I think people were quite buoyant and finding life quite easy, so they didn’t need any comfort in their homes. Now, post-pandemic, we want our houses to be much kinder to us because we’re spending more time in them. Beige has a redder undertone to it than grey. It’s a neutral with warmth – beige shades are softer, cosier and a little less hard-edged.”
It is the colour’s anaesthetising quality that many beige evangelists rave about. “I can appreciate colourful houses,” says 27-year-old dental hygienist Lilly Moffatt, “but when I go into them, they just don’t make me feel comfortable. I don’t feel calm and relaxed. I’ve got a really hectic and busy job and I just want to go home and feel relaxed and not have loud, bold patterns and colours in my face. Sometimes colour can add to the chaos of a busy life.” There is also the matter of longevity: Moffatt says that her parents’ house, which has fish-print wallpaper and murals hand-painted by her father, gets redecorated every year. But for Moffatt and her partner, who did much of their renovation themselves, that’s out of the question.
“The economy plays into it – people are concerned about how they’re spending their money and where they’re putting it,” says Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. “In the human mind, light tones like beiges are reliable – it’s the colour of the sphinx. People will often refer to the beige tones as everlasting and classic. They also associate these tones with nature, sand and stone – they’re dependable.” Eiseman sees beige less as a trend than as a presence: “It’s always there.”
But some find this presence a little menacing. “It’s nothingness. Where are these influencers taking us? What’s the idea? It’s pretending that the lack of an idea is an idea,” says Recker. He cites a barbed Karl Lagerfeld quote: “You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.” That’s how he feels about beige. “You don’t know what to do, so you’re sitting in your beige. Now what?”
Are we all so collectively exhausted by life and corroded by social media that we can’t think of a single, original idea? Tran has many detractors of the beige aesthetic in her life – but it’s them she feels sad for. “I’m just going to say that maybe you’re criticising it because you yourself cannot achieve it. Or you want to be like that, but you just don’t know how,” she says. An oat, a bone, a sand or a nude are a good place to start.
