I hope you’re done with burgundy, because according to Pantone, we’re all going to be moving away from Marsala, 2015’s big color trend, and on to something a little bit softer: Rose Quartz and Serenity. The soft shades of pink and blue are Pantone’s 2016 Colors of the Year.
If you’re not familiar with Pantone, the company is the steward of a color-matching system used primarily in the printing industry, which helps standardize shades across media and create consistent printed results, cataloging thousands of shades along the way. Every year, Pantone predicts which shade will be the trendiest over the next 12 months, and 2016’s the first time the company has chosen two.
According to Pantone, the company picked the shades (and specifically, a blur of the shades, which does not have its own name) as a nod to changing conceptions of gender in fashion and beyond, but whatever the reason, you’re most likely to run into these Easter-perfect shades in handbag form in the first few months of 2016, as spring collections hit shelves.
Of the two shades, Serenity was definitely the harder to match in existing bags. It has a purple undertone that makes the color lean more toward periwinkle than true blue, and most of the bags on the market had cooler undertones that kept them more toward traditional baby blue. Below, we’ve selected a dozen bags that are as close to each of the two shades as possible from designers’ current collections, as well as the Rebecca Minkoff bag above that manages to use them both.