COLORFUL IS THE NEW WHITE

COLORFUL IS THE NEW WHITE

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Walking around the ISH Frankfurt last week and visiting the stands of the world's largest sanitary ware producers, I felt nostalgic! Looking at those colorful bowls and washbasins with dark colors and bicolored as well, I remembered when I was still a young man starting my career in a Brazilian ceramics factory.

We produced sanitary ware and I worked in the development lab, at that time we had an arduous challenge of glazing the pieces with two colors, we didn't really know how to do it but, after a few attempts and several discarded pieces, we found a solution, we used a mold of wood to isolate the parts that we didn't want to glaze, so we solved the problem.

The colors were dark such as black, pink, green, blue and we developed an intense orange tone using a pigment based on Cadmium, believe me!

It's been at least three decades since I started my professional life and suddenly, I see products with the colors we used back then being produced today.

What happened?

In fact, colorful is the new white!

In the European sanitary ware market, for many years we have seen the white color as predominant in all models, at least until today.

What then explains the return of color?

Fashion trends are cyclical because we are constantly influenced by past fashions, nostalgia for bygone eras, the economy, social media and much more.

In the old days, old trends usually came back after 30 years, but today, with the increasing pace of life, trends are changing even faster. This movement is called in marketing, the nostalgia pendulum - or 30 year cycle - is when consumers come of age and begin to shape culture on their own. Reminiscent of good and fun memories, when life was easier and youth prevailed.

The reference to the past has lasted for centuries; and fashion is no exception. Gothic aesthetics, neoclassical silhouettes and art deco are just a few examples that have been frequently revisited throughout history.

So, this is the reason why we see color in sanitary ware pieces now, some like me, driven by nostalgia, revisited the past and revived what was once fashionable, to now be part of our lives once again.

Welcome colorful sanitary ware pieces! After all, colorful is the new white.