► Brands and their colours
► From Papaya Orange to Rosso Corsa
► The Sad Beige Lawsuit in detail…
So Ferrari launched its new hypercar in red, McLaren’s was orange and the new Aston Martin Valhalla was a zingy shade of British Racing Green. Sometimes I wish they’d swap it around a bit but it seems colour is a very emotive topic these days.
You’ll have no doubt heard about the ‘Sad Beige Lawsuit’ in the papers? Two social-media influencers, Sydney Gifford and Alyssa Sheil, apparently have nothing better to do than go to court over what Gifford claims is her ‘neutral, beige and cream aesthetic’. To cut a long story short, Gifford posts a lot of pictures of herself wearing brown clothes on Instagram. Gifford claims Shiel is stealing her ‘brand identity’ by also posting a lot of pictures of herself wearing brown clothes on Instagram. Gifford is seeking $150,000 in damages for what she calls is her ‘mental anguish and lost income’. Poor lamb.
It’s true, the images posted by the two women are often similar – but then, they are both flogging the same free tat sent to them by Amazon, so surely that’s just the cross you have to bear, when you’re “creating content” these days? There are millions of wannabe grifters trying to live off social media out there – and everyone’s posting essentially the same stuff, beige and otherwise. Even social media megastar Kim Kardashian (with a mind-boggling 359 million followers on Instagram) is so in love with beige, her Christmas decorations were brown last year. Who knew you could get brown tinsel?
Plus, colour specialist company Pantone recently named Mocha Mousse its 2025 Colour of the Year. It’s a ‘warming, brown hue imbued with richness’ Pantone helpfully tells us. Basically, it’s a chocolate-ice-cream shade of chocolate. So expect more beige, not less of it, over the coming months.
None of the car manufacturers have tried to legally copyright their favourite colour yet, but it is weird that there’s a kind of ‘ownership’ of certain hues. It’s like they all occupy their own territory on the visible spectrum – Rosso Corsa over here, Papaya Orange over there – a colour-wheel land grab that the other brands recognise and seem to go along with. Why doesn’t Ferrari launch its next new supercar in British Racing Green for a change? Would Aston Martin sue for mental anguish?
And weirdly – given its Instagram popularity – none of the manufacturers ‘own’ beige. The closest any brand has got to having a brown brand identity is probably Porsche. It offered the chocolatey Togo Braun colour for the 911 when it was first launched back in 1963, and during the 1970s there was a whole range of lovely Porsche browns available. These included the caramel-flavoured Kaschmir Braun; the coppery Kupfer Braun; the strangely named Cockney Braun; the orangey Sepia Braun; nutty Tabac Braun Metallic; and Sahara Beige (though really that’s a yellow). There was even a Mokka Braun too, though Porsche really missed a trick by not adding the word Mousse onto the end of that name. Imagine that – eight or nine shades of brown for you to choose from!
To show how committed Porsche is to brown, it even unveiled a concept car in brown a couple of years ago: remember the electric Mission X hypercar, finished in Rocket Metallic? It was a new colour, described by Porsche PR as ‘a muted, reserved brown tone’.
If there’s one brand that could enter into an all-out turf war with Porsche for the automotive ‘beige aesthetic’ it would be British Leyland. Like Porsche, BL offered a bunch of browns in the 1970s. They all had exotic Midlands names, like Bedouin, Antelope and Sombrero – plus, of course, the legendary Harvest Gold, fondly known as BLMC Beige. Customers ordered thousands of Minis, Maxis, MGs and Allegros in Harvest Gold, which is a soft ochre brown, similar to the colour of baby vomit, after the poor child has accidentally eaten a dozen ripe bananas dipped in cinnamon.
It’s not a nice colour and I’d wager no manufacturer on the planet still offers it – though you could still order it as a bespoke colour from a supercar manufacturer, should you want to. ‘You can have any colour you want!’ their personalisation services boast. ‘Your only limitation is your imagination!’ Imagine ordering a Ferrari F80 in British Leyland Harvest Gold.
Anyways, sadly British Leyland dropped of its perch in 1986 and Harvest Gold died along with it, which obviously saves Porsche the bother of an expensive lawsuit.
Editor-at-large Mark Walton loves F1, loves old circuits, but also loves flushing toilets