Did you know that The Autopian is considered by many in the United States government to be a crucial part of the Department of Homeland Security? While not “true” in the conventional sense, it’s nevertheless a responsibility I take quite seriously. Mostly what we do is keep careful tabs on the automotive world and detect potential threats early, before they can really cause harm.
We have such a threat detected, and it is serious enough that we felt it was important to bring it to your attention sooner rather than later when it could actually be destructive. We have detected an up-and-coming car color trend that, while a welcome break from the relentless slog of grayscale, nevertheless represents a genuine aesthetic threat to our collective automotive well-being. We call this color Discarded Band-Aid Beige or perhaps Creepy Abandoned Baby Doll Buff or even Prosthetic Peach. It was a color that was surprisingly common on consumer items and electronics in the 1970s and 1980s, and it must not be allowed to become trendy for cars.
We were alerted that this color trend should be escalated from an Issue of Concern to Potential Threat status when our own David Tracy showed us some pictures of a Lucid Air he spotted in Los Angeles bearing a variant of this particular color family:
As you can see, that color, while close to, say, butterscotch, isn’t quite there. It has a sort of duller quality, with a hint of innate dinginess. That’s because that Lucid Air is painted in this color, a color that somehow manages to evoke the feeling of countless oily hands gripping the clammy rubber of a CPR dummy. Something about this color makes one feel that whatever this color is, um, coloring, is the sort of public-use thing that has passed through thousands of unwashed hands.
This is the color of the baby doll you saw abandoned by the riverbank that’s been haunting your dreams for the past two weeks. This is the color of the cheapest possible prosthetic leg a mournfully inadequate insurance provider will spring for. It’s the subtly racist mocking color of a Band-Aid on the skin of anyone who dares to not be Caucasian and still gets a scrape. It’s the color of a battered mannequin in a Ross Dress for Less that has had two left hands since the Bush administration. It’s the color of off-brand clearance-rack vanilla ice milk, it’s the color of pus on a wound, the color of an inflatable sex doll bought as a novelty gift and used in earnest once during an excruciatingly low point in your life, and can never be looked at again without a wince of shame.
This is not a color for a car.
For unknowable reasons, probably having to do with the state of plastic molding and pigmenting tech of the 1970s and 1980s, this color was often used for the plastic housings of electronics that businesses would buy in bulk – never individual consumers, who would recoil at the idea. But you see lots of telecommunication equipment in this sad hue – telephones, fax machines, speakerphones, that kind of thing.
Bafflingly, this color is definitely trending in the automotive world, where it’s sometimes euphemistically called something evocative like Desert Sand or Desert Tan or something like that, something that’s supposed to conjure ideas of adventure and exoticism, but, really, it’s just the same color as a billion beige-ish plastic things nobody ever wanted or any number of bits of wearable medical equipment like a hearing aid or a urostomy bag. Look how many people are wrapping their Porsches and Lambos and BMWs and Challengers in this miserable hue:
This isn’t the first time this color or something close to it has attempted to move from the medical and sex-aid and undesirable electronics worlds into the automotive space: it’s shown up at various times since the 1950s, though often it was more skewed to the beige side of things, like the Wrigley’s gum beige VW was fond of in the late 1960s and early 1970s, or a more conventional sort of tan. Still, it wasn’t unknown, as you can see from the top left color in this 1970s Audi Fox color lineup:
This time, though, it’s different. The color isn’t just showing up here and there in the vast palettes of available colors of some cars, it’s actually becoming something of a trend, and people are choosing to get their cars wrapped in this color. Choices are being made! People are proud of showing off their cars that are the same color as the business end of a fleshlight:
#Lamborghini #Urus wrapped in Desert Sand wrap by California’s RDBLA gets new front rear fascia pic.twitter.com/GRVOVblVX5
— 24wheel_news (@24wheel_news) October 12, 2020
Look, we’re here to help. I know this is alarming, and I realize that we have to be extra careful not to stifle the proliferation of real car colors, because just having anything that isn’t black, white, or silver/gray is something that requires about as much care and nurturing as a rare orchid, but in this case, we simply cannot let this mannequin-prosthetic-fax-machine-creepy doll color stand. We just can’t. A line in the sand needs to be drawn, and we’ve drawn that line.
Knock it off with this sickly color, people. Reformulate your desert sand-evoking colors. You can do it. Just be, you know, aware this time. We’ll be watching.
[Ed note: I saw a Lambo in this color in LA this weekend and I kind of liked it. While it wouldn’t work on a Nissan Altima it’s kind of fun on an exotic. Hopefully, this opinion won’t result in me having to clean David’s floor again… – MH]
“It’s the subtly racist mocking color of a Band-Aid on the skin of anyone who dares to not be Caucasian and still gets a scrape.”
(That’s a great line)
To be fair…
Johnson & Johnson recently released their new line of “Band-Aid” brand “Ourtone” adhesive bandages.
Just slap a few of those on the hundreds of years old gaping wound of racial inequality, kiss the boo boo better and carry on.
Yay! Problem solved.
Comment section security:
“You said you’d show yourself out.”
Looks like the auto industry’s Shirley Card needs updating; this isn’t normal.
I’m torn.
This colour is hideous.
But it’s also not one of the 100’s of shades of grey out there.
Yeah, but it’s like the automakers heard that we are tired of gray and silver cars, and decided to re-release a color that is worse than either. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I would rather have gray or silver than Barbie Buttcheek Beige.
I’ve been told that this color is especially popular with Master Race types.
The proper name for this color is “Prosthetic Leg Beige”. I’ll expect you to use that name from now on.
…I was thinking of it as a “Faded Fax Fawn”.
Oh for the 70s & 80s when you could chose among a multiple shades of brown…sometimes two of them at the same time! My wife has a Caprice like that. With pinstripes.
I can’t express how much I hate this color. It’s the color of a hearing aid with a shmear of earwax. The color of an assistive medical device for a bodily function you don’t want to contemplate. The color of every computer in the early 90’s before they mellowed to a yellowish patina.
The best part of those computers is that the beige metal case has faded a bit but the ABS plastic bezel and front cover have turned a hideous sickly yellow that stands out like a rotting foot
It’s definitely spread to Brooklyn Heights. Ugh.
I’m still looking for the definitive story of all these eggshell colors that suddenly started appearing – you can’t swing a stick around here without hitting a Crosstek painted in one. Most of which seem to have a hearty dollop of grey mixed in, like an addiction automakers can’t quite quit.
It is a little alarming how much this applies to a lot of things I think about regularly…
Maybe a color that won’t show dirt as easily? Because it already looks dirty? Looks like white plastic that’s been UV roasted?
I found the 80s electronics plastics to be more beige, at least compared to this dried baby shit colored car I’m seeing on my phone. There were cars in the beige color and I liked it. Still do.
The grandkids, after an episide of the show “Bluey” (highly recommended), have begun collecting a “car rainbow” whenever we’re out driving. First, find a red car (easy), then an orange (not very common), then yellow (like orange), green (easy again), blue (simple) and finally purple (near impossible).
They’ve unofficially tacked on pink (actually impossible), but I doubt there will be any call for Desert Tan.
So, people are putting a wrap on their car that’s band-aid coloured?
So we can say they bandaged the car?
Thank you for bringing attention to this cause. To quote a friend’s 8-year-old, “Man, that’s… just… no.”
I would call this shade “Barbie Buttcheek Beige.” Tell me I’m wrong:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/BFgAAOSweVBlLxC8/s-l1600.jpg
New color’s name: “Honky”.
Ngl, I gave some semi-serious thought to wrapping my old 2014 E-class in this color and doing the part-time uber thing just for the lulz
I’m with Michelle. I think it looks interesting on an exotic vehicle.
My name for it has always been “Hearing Aid Beige.”
Even as somebody who loves 1970s design (to a degree that disturbs my acquaintances) I do not wish for the return of what was known as “sunset peach” in old design catalogues. Give me avocado green appliances, give me gold and lilac flower print wallpaper, give me sunset stripes on brown fishing coolers, but for the love of god do not let sunset peach return.
I agree that this colour is alarming and I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy, but the very first rule of our great publication is: thou shalt not yuck thy neighbours yum.
Meh. The best you’ll get from me is, “It’s a free country – you’re as free to like it as I am to tell you it’s shit.”
I mean, I have to live around these people:
https://www.mortonsonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/squat.png
…and I would be a bad American if I didn’t recognize their right to make their trucks as awful as they like. And the price to them of this freedom is the literally instinctive laughter I break into when I see one. They are free to drive ridiculous trucks, just not free from me laughing at them.
Somewhere I saw a render of a truck that was squatted and stanced at the same time. I cant find it now, and its possible the internet police seized it and locked it away. Now I’m picturing it in this color.
It is definitely heartbreaking when people turn great cars into useless machines. It’s a practice in acceptance
As a child of the 80s, this color has a strange nostalgic appeal of heavily used institutional things. It evokes the smell of cigarette smoke and Lysol. It works as a fashion color for the same reason that waifish women look cute in east-German military jackets.
I agree strawberry Margherita puke is not a good color,I doubt it becomes popular because it is a custom color because not white silver or black, but I’ll take it over the dull 3 just so every car doesn’t look alike.
I guess on the bright side if you are buying the cheapest car at the cheapest trim it is great that it looks like the most expensive similar car ate the most expensive trim. But not so good in reverse
Auto Journalists: all cars are the same, we need uniqueness and difference!
People do different things
Auto Journalists: no, not like that
Agreed, and most of them unlike are favorites don’t even own cars.
Okay, counterpoint:
We beg for colors besides black, white, and fifty shades of gray, and they trot out this? 1978 unmarked detective’s car beige?
https://i0.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/79FordFairmont1jg.jpg?fit=900%2C600&ssl=1
Funny, I was just complaining about this color in someone’s company logo the other day. I was calling it “Grubby Barbie.”
Yeah Barbie getting dirty.
I suspect that this is an age thing, for those of us equipped with the ancient knowledge this is color that will be forever associated with the sad, putty colored broken past.
The young, exciting people of today know well that the past was an exciting time, vibrant with the glow of beigey-pink plastic and Morris Marinas.
I’d sooner see the Butterscotch pudding color Germans loved in the 70s. For an example look up the BMW motorcycle color “Curry” which is peak early 70s when applied to a toaster tank /5.
I also saw it back in the day on a German diplomat’s private import 240D.
I find it hilarious that Jason hates this color so much and yet the new comments are highlighted in band-air beige.
LOL