Colour of the Year conversations tend to arrive with authority. Charts, forecasts, explanations that try to sound definitive. This year, after watching the noise around it all unfold, we decided to do something simpler. We picked our own.
At Open All Hours, colour has always been about feeling before formula. Mood before meaning. The same way a good coffee tells you everything you need to know from the first sip. You do not need a manifesto to understand when it works. You just feel it.
That is how Sparkling Cosmo entered the room.
There has not been a pink tone leading the conversation for over a decade, and that absence started to feel telling. Not because pink is missing, but because it has been misunderstood. Treated as decorative rather than directional. Soft when it can be sharp. Sparkling Cosmo sits somewhere else entirely.
This is not a novelty pink. It is not nostalgia-led or sugar-coated. It carries energy, warmth without sentimentality. It’s the colour of collaboration rather than performance. A tone that knows how to hold attention without asking for it.
We kept coming back to its range.
Sparkling Cosmo feels just as at home moving through a Brazilian carnival crowd as it does resting quietly inside a Danish coffee shop. It works on sun-faded walls and polished concrete floors. It can live in the heat and in isolation. That adaptability mattered to us. We wanted a colour that travels well, culturally and emotionally.
In a year that already feels like it will demand optimism, not the forced kind, but the intentional kind, Sparkling Cosmo offers a form of escapism that still feels grounded. It invites without overwhelming and brings people into the same room rather than placing them on opposite sides of a moodboard.
There is also something important about timing.
2026 feels like a year where creative culture will need more generosity. More shared language. More colour that can hold multiple interpretations without collapsing into trend. Sparkling Cosmo does not insist on a single meaning. It allows space for people to project their own energy into it. That flexibility is the point.
Much like coffee, if the base is wrong, nothing added on top will save it. You can dress it up with milk, syrups, and ritual, but the taste always comes back to the bean. Sparkling Cosmo works because it starts with good taste. Everything else builds naturally from there.
For Open All Hours, this colour is not a campaign device. It’s a signal. A way of expressing where our head and heart are moving as a creative house. Toward work that feels alive. Toward collaboration that feels open and toward optimism that doesn’t need to shout.
We are not interested in picking a colour to follow the year. We wanted one that could help shape it.
Sparkling Cosmo is our colour of the year because it understands something simple. Energy and calm do not have to compete. They can exist in the same cup.
And that feels like the right way to step into 2026.
Shot of the good stuff.
