Analyzing a decade of Colors of the Year

The Color of the Year was first introduced by Pantone in 2000, and recently (the last decade) we saw the trend of introducing a Color of the Year being picked up by more and more companies. Paints and coatings companies typically select their colors of the year by extensive research by designers and trend experts, resulting in a plurality of colors being introduced as Color of the Year, every year. In this article, we collated colors of the year of 15 different paints and coatings companies published in the past decade and we show that most colors of the year can be described as neutral or off‐white color (ie, the median value for NCS Chromaticness is low, 20%) although occasionally colors of the year have high NCS Chromaticness. We demonstrate that the distribution of colors of the year follow a certain narrative from year to year: The average Lightness and Chroma (averaged over all companies, per year) appear to follow a wavelike pattern, where the average Lightness appears to repeat itself every ~8 years and the average Chroma approximately every 4.5 years. Similarly, we can see a cyclic pattern in the hue: From mostly yellowish red or greenish blue in 2015, towards predominantly blue in 2017, to a wide variation in hues in 2020 suggesting a fragmentation in colors of the year preferences. In addition, we demonstrate that the colors of the year differ significantly from what can be expected if the colors would have been selected randomly. This could reflect the fact that paint companies use similar raw data to identify their color trends.     

Catalytic One‐Pot Oxetane to Carbamate Conversions: Formal Synthesis of Drug Relevant Molecules

Oxetanes are versatile building blocks in drug‐related synthesis to induce property‐modulating effects. Whereas related oxiranes are widely used in coupling chemistry with carbon dioxide (CO₂) to afford value‐added commodity chemicals, oxetane/CO₂ couplings remain extremely limited despite the recent advances in the synthesis of these four‐membered heterocycles. Here we report an effective one‐pot three‐component reaction (3CR) strategy for the coupling of (substituted) oxetanes, amines and CO₂ to afford a variety of functionalized carbamates with excellent chemoselectivity and good yields. The process is mediated by an aluminium‐based catalyst under relatively mild conditions and the developed catalytic methodology can be applied to the formal synthesis of two pharmaceutically relevant carbamates with the 3CR being a key step.