The sad beige aesthetic: why has the world suddenly turned taupe?

Whether it’s oat, bone, sand or fawn, this colour palette has a strong anaesthetising effect – and it has become the leading fashion and interiors style of our era

I t’s not that 39-year-old Mina Tran wants a life completely devoid of bright colours. She just doesn’t want them anywhere near her home or her children’s wardrobes. “You can’t avoid them,” says the doctor and mother of three from Texas. “They creep into areas of my life that I can’t control. You go outside and the grass is green.”

Nor can she prevent her children from growing up and developing their own taste, or family members buying things for them in brash reds and blues, or her husband dressing them – and it gives her no pleasure to recount this – “in colourful stuff from Amazon without me knowing”. But for now, in the small areas of her life that she has sway over, Tran dreams in taupe and fawn, parchment and bisque.

She is an unabashed “sad beige mum” – a woman determined to keep the garish implements of childhood at bay, and instead foster a sober palette of beige-on-beige. “You won’t see my kids in primary or secondary colours unless it’s pyjamas,” says Tran. Polychromatic plastic toys? Forget about it. A Technicolour playroom, even? “We have one play area and that play area is also the living space. I don’t want to stare at something hot pink and neon green every day,” she says. So that is also a resounding no.

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