2025 is coming. It’s cloaked in ‘future dusk.’

As 2024 comes to a close, anxiety seems to be hanging in the air.

From a whirlwind election season to increasing concerns about climate change, global unrest and a fragmenting sense of community both on and offline, people are feeling uneasy.

“It really does feel like we’re on the brink of multiple crises around climate change but also growing global unrest and a fractured political landscape here in the United States, but also elsewhere,” Jessa Lingel, a digital culture professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Yahoo Entertainment. The mood on the internet reflects this.

“Not only do you have in the media landscape, people turning away from platforms like Twitter [aka] X, but you also have people just turning away from the news,” Lingel explained, adding that news networks like CNN and MSNBC are seeing a dip in viewership following the 2024 election. “I think a lot of people are coping with their disappointment and frustration in the election by turning off legacy media like the news and also sort of disengaging from some of the mainstream platforms.”

Disruption appears to be the overarching sentiment going into a new year. According to the trend forecasting agency Worth Global Style Network (WGSN), one color effectively captures this mood. It’s called future dusk.

“Future dusk is a dark, moody and intriguing hue, sitting between blue and purple,” Urangoo Samba, WGSN’s head of color, told Yahoo Entertainment. “It has a sense of mystery and escapism, and feeds into themes of transition — whether it be moving from dark to light, or dusk to dawn — making it perfect for a period of immense change.”

Upon analyzing “millions of data points,” the WGSN’s Global Color Workshop selected future dusk as the color of 2025. When choosing a color of the year, Samba said versatility across all industries and regions is essential. Future dusk meets the mark.

The color is said to offer “reassuring stability” during what WGSN describes as today’s “era of polycrisis.” There’s also a “celestial, otherworldly” quality to future dusk, which Samba said is influenced by “the second space age” and rise of “synthetic creativity,” like AI-generated art.

Evan Collins, an architectural designer and founder of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, an online database that catalogs design aesthetics from the late midcentury, told Yahoo that the “dusty, celestial” color of future dusk is prominent in the “whimsigothic” aesthetic that existed primarily from the late ’80s to the mid-’90s. Melding both whimsical and gothic elements, the term, coined by Collins, is anchored by dark purples and blues that are similar to future dusk.

“In times where there’s a lot of strife and stress, especially [when] people are struggling with all sorts of big societal issues, they’ll look to the mystical,” he explained. “[Whimsigothic] is not so future, space-oriented. It’s more looking back into the past to give some comfort about an uncertain future.”

Collins doesn’t necessarily agree with the color as reflecting the space age.

There’s a sterility associated with technology that Collins said is absent in future dusk. The WGSN’s descriptors of the color as being “futuristic” and inspired by “science and technology” are more in tune with the sleek, cold aesthetics of the ’80s, said Collins.

Future dusk, as Collins understands it, is more a color of nostalgia and familiarity than it is of futurism and technology.

“It’s celestial [and] otherworldly, but not in a synthetic, high-tech, space way,” he said of the color. “I actually think there’s a lot of negative stuff towards that and the popularity of a moody, celestial color is kind of a way of actually taking it back. That’s [why] ‘whimsigothic’ is popular and maybe even dark academia, and the trending towards darker tones that hearken back to older spaces, that are cozy and have more traditional design vibes to them as opposed to cold, synthetic ‘tech bro’ stuff.”

Lingel, like Collins, believes future dusk is a color that acknowledges the uncertainty of these times — be it politics, climate change or the continued push for AI — and how it affects the way we articulate ourselves online.

“For most of us, it’s not reasonable to think that we’re just going to not communicate online or not relate to digital culture because it’s such a powerful form of community,” Lingel said. “I do think there’s a lot of uncertainty around how we’re using it, how digital culture is sort of changing human relationships. I think for a lot of people, the election was a very powerful, sobering reminder of the filter bubbles that we live in.”

Lingel sees future dusk as being rooted in contemplation.

“I do see a connection to caves and grottos,” Lingel said of the color. “Grottos are a place where people go to be contemplative and meditative, so I think people are looking for those spaces and they’re not necessarily finding them online right now … I can see the appeal of this tension between escapism and the future, and also trying to search for some form of stability.”

Technology is drastically changing our relationship with empathy. Future dusk, in this context, symbolizes our fight to preserve it.

“I think it’s a time when people are reevaluating,” Lingel said. “‘How am I going to spend this time online? Where am I going to find community? Are there healthier ways that I could be using these platforms?’ So I do think [future dusk] is speaking to that desire for meditative spaces.”

For WGSN, future dusk remains accurately named and described. The color is representative of the exhilarating and unprecedented advancements in science and technology. It’s meant to signal an era of transition.