I’ve decided to take a really good look at the Contemporary Romance Colors that are most prevalent on covers this year and attempt to identify what is the CR-COTY, the Contemporary Romance Color of the Year.
Sidenote: did you know I’m not technically supposed to name things? I’m not good at it. If “CR-COTY” is making your eyelids twitch, I am also responsible for the name DABWAHA, the bracket tournament of romance we used to co-host. So yeah, naming is not my strong suit.
BUT I’m DOING IT ANYWAY. Con Rom COTY!
As I mentioned in the first post about my color obsession, there are color schemes that are so closely tied to one genre, like Suspense is Blue and Gold.
I came to find out on BluSky that Librarian Extraordinare Robin Bradford calls it ‘Murder Yellow.’
MURDER. YELLOW.
So yeah, as I mentioned, I’m not good at naming things but Robin sure is! Murder Yellow. I love it.
The first collection of covers for your voting consideration has arrived, and the folder is called:
Green, Y’all.
I’m going to share the covers color by color, and at the end we’ll vote on which one is THE color of the year.
Before I show off all my covers that I’ve downloaded over the past few months, I want to cause your blood pressure to go up a little: have you seen ISMY.blue?
It’s going to test your color perception by showing different colors, and you have to identify if it is blue, or green. This caused a lot of yelling on BluSky, btw. So brace yourself.
In the event you spot a cover and think, ‘No, wait, that’s blue,’ I hear you. I spent too much time looking at shades of blue/green/blueish green/greenish blue for the past 10 minutes and am no longer sure what colors even are anymore.
All of these covers are linked should you want to learn more – shop that green wave, y’all! NB: our buy links contain affiliate codes that send a portion of your purchase back to us at no cost to you.
Shall we get started?
So, there is some GREEN going on in Contemporary Romance, eh? I expected all the holiday and Christmas romances to have green backgrounds, but so many contemporaries have green, teal, light green, dark green, tennis or pickleball court green – it’s a whole thing.
Oh – and there are some historical illustrated covers that are green, too:
These covers are GREEN AF.
So why green? Aside from the obvious green & red Christmas holiday connection, green has a few meanings within color theory. It can represent nature, obvs, alongside related meanings like growth, beginnings, abundance, and possibility. A number of these covers are illustrations of people outside, so the references to nature make sense.
Cameron Chapman wrote an overview of color theory for designers at Smashing Magazine, and collected additional meanings for green in terms of design – and covers are marketing designed to be alluring to readers, so the meanings are important.
According to Chapman, green can also be a calming color, conveying balance or harmony, and, of course, money if you’re in the US. Our money is green (green is even a slang word for money) and that correlates to wealth. “Green” is also a shorthand for environmental awareness.
I know there is/was a very active dark green paint and wallpaper trend on Pinterest for bedrooms (I am looking for a color for my bedroom, which is how I noticed). It’s a popular color within the dark academia aesthetic, too: rich, soothing, invoking dark forests which can be peaceful or menacing or both. NB: I’m not as fluent in the meaning of the color green within the realm of art history, so if you have knowledge in that area, please share.
Ken Phillips at Hunter Lab notes that green is a sacred color within Islam as it was the prophet Mohammed’s favorite color – I didn’t know that! – and is connected to vitality and peace. Hailey Van Braam at ColorPsychology.org writes that green embodies “harmony, tranquility…stability and endurance,” all qualities that lend themselves well to a romance plotline: a reader expects the HEA will include some if not all of those components.
So in terms of contemporary romance, in addition to the Christmas holiday color scheme and the placement of the illustrated characters outdoors in green fields and yards, the use of green might evoke calm, balance and harmony, wealth, abundance, growth, and possibility. Makes sense!
I’ll have more colors for your perusal soon! Thanks for taking this trip through cover design and color theory with me. I’m having a really good time and I hope you’re enjoying this journey, too!
What do you think the color green conveys for Contemporary Romance? What other green covers have you spotted?
Thanks for the ISMY.Blue link! That was fun. What a clever idea.
This is one of my areas of professional expertise, so: it’s not really testing your perception, it’s testing your categorization, and Sarah, your takeaway of “what even are colors” is the correct one. If you wait a few weeks and retake the test, it’s not unlikely that your answers may be different! That’s normal.
I’ve had multiple jobs that involved spending a lot of time determining the correct dictionary meaning for words in text. This sounds easy to most people. It’s actually brutally difficult.
Word meaning is kind of an illusion.
We tend to believe that words have fixed, specific meanings; we look at dictionaries and see a nice neat list of meanings and think that reflects reality. But it doesn’t, except in very technical contexts like legal or academic writing, and then only when strictly defined. It’s usage that determines meaning, and usage is, by design, fuzzy and flexible and prone to shifts over time.
Every single lexical word represents a category (usually multiple categories because most words have multiple usages). People generally agree on the core, prototypical members of the category, like the sky being blue and blood being red, but the further you get from the core, the more variation there is in terms of what belongs there, and the higher the level of arbitrariness. This is especially true when you have a spectrum, like with colors. There are languages that divide up the primary colors differently than English does; they might use the same word for green and blue.
They did a really cool experiment a long time ago where they asked people to sort a bunch of Vessels into cups, mugs, and bowls. There were some objects everyone agreed were cups, and so on, but everyone’s categories were a bit different. Same thing if you give people paint swatches to sort. And the same person is not unlikely to produce a different sorting for more peripheral members on a different day, too.
Tl;dr Words are very meaningful, but most of what we believe about them as units of meaning is a sort of sanity-preserving myth. The blue-vs-green quiz hints at this.
For a long time when it came to selling sporty things to women the philosophy was shrink it and pink it. Someone figured out they could sell more widgets if they offered more colors, but marketing didn’t want to use manly colors lest that cause losses in their core manly sport widget market, which led to Teal: the sporty girl’s pink.
So whenever you are deep in the weeds of blue-green vs green-blue, don’t worry. It’s sporty-pink.
Murder Yellow is so spot on. I thought immediately of Alyssa Cole’s cover for When No One Is Watching. (haven’t read it, don’t know if there’s a murder in it, only that it was billed as a creepy thriller)
“Make The Season Bright” by Ashley Herring Blake is a new book (out in October) with a green cover. It’s a very pretty cover, actually, for being illustrated – it goes for more details, less “color blob”.
@Star: that is really really interesting and confirms a number of questions I had. Thank you! This is fascinating.
I don’t have anything to say about green, but the cover for HOW TO GET A LIFE IN TEN DATES feels refreshingly unusual to me (which may be my ignorance speaking) without being obviously weird. The spatial relationship of the characters despite not being in a setting, the hanging lights framing the top and the character on top, the character on top being so much more prominent due to position and color, the fat rep…I guess there aren’t that many factors, but it stood out to me.
love the blue/green colors. I think they’ve slowly been coming on in the past couple of years based on a few books I have on my shelf.
But those suspense books, while a nice blue/yellow/house color combo, start to all look alike.
I did the ISMY.blue test yesterday. Apparently, I consider turquoise to be green. However, The DM Diaries, above, tips over into blue for me.
As someone who has spent half her life categorizing colors (or at least floss colors, to the point where I now think in terms of DMC color numbers) I respectfully suggest that most of the above covers are not green but blue. LIFE IN TEN DATES, THE MERRY MATCHMAKERS, SLOW DANCE and YES NO MAYBE, as well as the two historicals, are the only ones I would definitively categorize as green. But that could be my monitor speaking, since every monitor also sees things differently.
I do know that warm yellow-greens are one of the colors for Cancer in astrology, and forest greens for Capricorn. And many hospital interiors were (are?) still painted green because it was considered a soothing color that promotes healing (although there was also a problem where that particular shade of green became associated with sickness and decay, so many switched to more neutral colors.)
And because someone will probably ask, they are in order: 598, 3810, 813, 502 (ok, I concede that one), 912, 905, 597, 3766, 931, 3816, 470, 598/597, 701, 992, 998 and 562, at least according to my monitor.
Some of the covers are borderline to me, but the DM Diaries is definitely blue for me. It’s the same color as the curtains that came with our first house. When my husband said something about the green curtains I had no idea what he was talking about.
I did a survey of our family members (siblings and their spouses), and the result was my western New York relatives all called that color blue while his Michigan relatives all said green. I decided it must be an arbitrary regional difference.
Kristal: I also apparently consider turquoise to be green according to the website, though in real life, I consider it to be a shade of blue (but, could be monitor issue).
and SusanE: DM Diaries is definitely blue to me, too.
Fun post!
I thought DM Diaries was blue before I ever even got into the article. But the test also says that I tend to see the intermediate colors as blue not green.
According to that web site, my boundary is 63% on the green side, but when I look at the spectrum on the final page, I would put my green boundary an inch to the right, so I should be even more green.
I consider the color usually called turquoise to be a blue, but I have a turquoise bracelet that is definitely green.
I am fascinated by the debate about DM Diaries, because I had put that cover in the folder with the other blues and it looked green by such a margin to my eyes that I moved it. This is really interesting.
Also, EC Spurlock, listing the DMC codes CRACKED ME UP! What a nifty and useful skill!
@SB Sarah, it used to drive my late husband crazy. “Look at this rose, it’s a perfect 815!” “It’s RED.” “No, it’s Medium Garnet.”
“What color do you want to paint the kitchen, Hon?” “746.” “WHAT IS THAT?” We used to go to Home Depot with floss skeins in hand to match colors.
OK that’s so funny picturing you waving around skeins of floss in the paint department. I LOVE this. What an adorable memory.
KKW – TEAL IS SPORTY PINK?! It’s so true!
Also I still think The DM Diaries is green. 😀
Also, keep in mind that colors will look different depending on what other colors are adjacent to them. A turquoise next to a yellow or purple will look more green than the exact same shade next to pink or brown.