Short answer
Much less than for cars, and it sorts into three piles that should not be mixed. One open dataset with colour values, the parts in LEGO sets, can be analysed year by year. Two measured studies, of museum objects and of film trailers, publish a direction but no numbers. One long official series describes what new American houses are clad in, which is a material and not a colour. Colourwise's list of categories with no defensible series, from interior paint to clothing, runs to 10 entries after a second search in October 2026.
A categorical series gives the share of things filed under a named colour: so many per cent grey. A measured series gives a colour value for each thing counted, from which chroma and lightness can be calculated. A finding is a study's conclusion without the figures behind it. They answer different questions. A registry's 'grey' is a word chosen at a counter; a catalogue's grey is a point in a colour space; a study's 'greyer' is an author's reading of a chart. Colourwise keeps them in separate tables and never averages or chains them. Outside cars, the categorical pile is almost empty: nobody publishes the share of sofas, coats, kettles or front doors by colour, year after year.
Rebrickable's volunteer-maintained catalogue lists the parts in more than 28,000 LEGO sets, each part with a named colour and a nominal screen value, and may be reused with acknowledgement. Summing parts by colour for the sets released in a year gives a real time series. It shows two things at once. The palette in use grew from 10 colours in 1975 to 112 in 2004, was cut to 64 by 2007 and stands at 75 in 2025. And the parts themselves became less vivid: strongly coloured parts were 64.3% of the opaque total in 1975 and 16.6% in 2025. It is one maker's product range, counted by what sets contain rather than by what sold.
The Science Museum Group analysis of 7,083 object photographs found grey rising and brown and yellow falling across two centuries, and its author links that mainly to plastic and metal replacing wood and brass. No pixel counts and no code were published with it, so the result can be cited but not recomputed or put on a scale. A University of Waterloo study clustered the colours of trailers for more than 29,000 North American films released from 1960 to 2019; the university's account quotes an author saying earlier decades leaned on more saturated primaries and later ones use a wider variety. An older peer-reviewed study found films getting darker from 1935 to 2010, which is brightness, not colourfulness. None of the three yields a figure for 'how much less colourful'.
The United States Census Bureau has published the main cladding material of new single-family houses every year since 1973. It is a proper sample survey with stated errors, and it is not about colour. What it shows is the surface that colour is applied to changing: wood was the main cladding of 42% of new houses in 1980 and 6% in 2025, while vinyl siding, first counted separately in 1992, reached 39% in 2000 and fibre cement 23% in 2025. Wood is painted or stained by its owner and repainted every few years; vinyl arrives in a factory colour and keeps it. The series is recorded as a proxy for that shift and is kept out of every colour metric on this site.
For interior paint, furniture, clothing, appliances, consumer electronics, packaging and logos, weddings, and building façades, the search found no series that states what was counted, how, and on the same basis from year to year. What exists instead is of three kinds: single-year statements by a brand or retailer, with no method and no earlier figure to set beside it; launch announcements, which document what a maker offered; and one-off surveys that describe a place or a season once. Each of those can be true and still be no evidence of change. The second table on this page lists, for each category, what a usable series would need and the nearest thing found.
| Category | Evidence | Kind of count | Years | Usable as a series? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Primary exterior wall material of new single-family houses, United States | Construction survey (material, not colour) | 1975–2025 | Yes, as a material series only |
| Toys and product ranges | Colours of the parts in LEGO sets, by year of release | Catalogue inventory | 1970–2025 | Yes: colour values per part, sampled years |
| Consumer objects | Colours of everyday objects in the Science Museum Group collection | Museum-collection photographs | 1800–2020 | No: conclusions published, numbers not |
| Film | Dominant colours in film trailers, 1960–2019 | Film frames | 1960–2019 | No: conclusions published, numbers not |
| Interiors | Interior paint | None found | — | No |
| Interiors | Furniture and furnishings | None found | — | No |
| Fashion | Clothing and fashion | None found | — | No |
| Consumer objects | Domestic appliances | None found | — | No |
| Consumer objects | Phones, laptops and consumer electronics | None found | — | No |
| Branding and fashion | Packaging, logos and branding | None found | — | No |
| Fashion | Weddings and events | None found | — | No |
| Architecture | Building façades and house colour | None found | — | No |
| Film | Film and television colourfulness | None found | — | No |
| Toys and product ranges | Toys and children's products other than LEGO | None found | — | No |
| Category | What a usable series would need | Nearest evidence found |
|---|---|---|
| Interior paint | Paint or tinting-machine sales by colour family, from one seller, counted the same way over several years. | Search results show brands and retailers issuing single-year statements (a best-selling shade, a neutral share of sales) with no stated method and no earlier years on the same basis; none was recorded. No national statistic on paint by colour was found. Colour-of-the-year announcements are forecasts and are kept in the trends dataset. |
| Furniture and furnishings | Sales or catalogue listings by colour from a large retailer across years. | Nothing with a stated sample. Catalogue archives exist as images and have not been analysed in any published study Colourwise could find. |
| Clothing and fashion | The colour of garments sold or worn, sampled consistently over years — a retailer's catalogue with a stated method, or street photography coded for colour. | Academic work on runway colour was found only as abstracts: palette-extraction methods tested on small image sets, and one study mining the words of show reviews rather than measuring garments. Runway collections are what designers showed, not what was sold. None was found to give a year-by-year colour series, and none was read in full. |
| Domestic appliances | Shipments or sales by finish, or a maker's dated record of finishes offered. | No shipment or sales series by finish was found, and no maker's dated archive of the finishes it offered. One brand's marketing statement about its colour launches is recorded as a finding. |
| Phones, laptops and consumer electronics | Units sold by colour, or at least a complete dated list of colours offered per model. | Launch releases document the colours of individual models and are recorded as findings. No maker publishes sales by colour, and no complete, sourced range history was assembled here. |
| Packaging, logos and branding | A defined set of brands or packs sampled at fixed dates and measured for colour. | Case-by-case logo histories and student theses on small brand sets. Nothing found supports the claim that brands have lost colour, or refutes it. |
| Weddings and events | A repeated survey reporting colour choices on the same question each year. | Annual wedding surveys with large stated samples exist. Coverage of them names leading colours for individual years in forms that differ from year to year — a rank order one year, a shortlist another, a single percentage a third — and no consistent table was found, so nothing is recorded. |
| Building façades and house colour | A repeated colour inventory of the same streets or towns, decades apart. | Façade colour inventories are single surveys that describe a place at one date. The only long official series on house exteriors is the US cladding-material table, held above as a proxy and not as colour. |
| Film and television colourfulness | Chroma or saturation measured on a defined sample of titles per year. | Two measured studies, both recorded as findings: falling luminance in 160 films from 1935 to 2010, and trailer palettes for 29,000 films from 1960 to 2019. Neither publishes a saturation figure by year that Colourwise has read. |
| Toys and children's products other than LEGO | An open product catalogue with colour recorded per item and a release date. | Only the LEGO catalogue is open, dated and coloured at the level of the part. Crayon assortments are documented as box sizes, which is a count of colours offered and is recorded as a finding. |
Each statement is labelled by kind — established fact, a standard’s requirement, observed market data, a convention, or Colourwise’s own interpretation or analysis — with the strength of the evidence behind it.
Observed market dataStrong evidence· United States· 1980 and 2025
The US Census Bureau's Survey of Construction records wood as the primary exterior wall material of 42% of new single-family houses completed in 1980 and 6% of those completed in 2025.
Measured: New single-family houses completed, estimated from a sample survey.
Caveat: A material, not a colour: the series says nothing about what colour any house was. Percentages are rounded to whole numbers.
Colourwise analysisModerate evidence
In the inventories of LEGO sets released in a year, the number of named colours in use rises from 10 in 1975 to 112 in 2004 and stands at 75 in 2025.
Based on: Colourwise's count of distinct colours across the first inventory of every set dated to each year in Rebrickable's catalogue files of 6 October 2026, spare parts and placeholder colours excluded.
Caveat: A volunteer-maintained catalogue; counts what sets contain, not what was sold, and covers early decades less completely.
Source: LEGO Catalog Database Download (colors, sets, inventories and inventory parts)
FactModerate evidence
A University of Waterloo study analysed the trailers of more than 29,000 North American films released between 1960 and 2019 by clustering frame colours into palettes.
Caveat: Taken from the university's release, which gives no figures; the paper itself was not read. Trailers are not whole films.
Source: Computer scientists paint a picture of six decades of movies
Colourwise interpretationLimited evidence
Colourwise lists 10 product and design categories outside cars for which it found no published colour series with a stated sample and a consistent method across years.
Based on: Colourwise's search of October 2026 across manufacturer, retailer, trade-association, statistical-office, museum and academic sources, recorded category by category in the no-defensible-series list.
Caveat: An absence of published data. Companies hold sales by colour that they do not publish, and some academic work was seen only as an abstract.
Reviewed 6 October 2026. Colourwise summarises its sources in its own words and does not reproduce standards text or proprietary colour data. Spotted an error? Tell us.