I don’t know about you but my whole feed looks like it was colour graded by a sleep-deprived detective. Brands, films, outfits… all washed like someone dragged the saturation to zero and never looked back. Even logos look like they’re going through something. And yes, I’m typing this in a washed grey tee so clearly I’m in the trenches too. So how exactly did we get here? And more importantly, what comes next?

- abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

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Your emotional support chatbot's about to come with a side of ads. Because code found in ChatGPT's Android beta app includes references to "ads feature," "search ad," and "bazaar content". Now there's no official rollout date yet. But it's looking like OpenAI is gearing up to introduce ads. These would most likely appear in search results and as product recs for free-tier users.

This follows the same strategy we've seen from Google's AI Overviews, Microsoft's Copilot, and Perplexity. These tools already embed ads into AI-generated answers. Now for us marketers, this opens up a whole new frontier of advertising (yay). But it's also a reminder that AI platforms eventually need to make money just like the rest of us.

K-beauty has officially gone mainstream. U.S. sales of Korean cosmetics are expected to hit $2 billion in 2025, up 37% from last year, according to NielsenIQ via CNBC. And retailers are in a full-on turf war. Ulta launched "K-beauty World" and secured exclusive partnerships. Sephora now has an entire wall of Korean products at its Times Square flagship. Even Costco and Walmart are stocking K-beauty now.

What's driving this? TikTok. Posts tagged "K-beauty" rack up 250 million views per week, and Gen Z and millennials (who make up three-fourths of K-beauty consumers) are discovering products through viral #GRWMs, not traditional ads. As a result, products with sleek packaging and gentle formulas are flying off shelves faster than retailers can restock. The catch? Brands leaning heavily on TikTok for discovery are one algorithm change away from losing all that momentum.

Outdoor brands love their pristine mountain shots and aspirational "find yourself in nature" messaging. But Columbia's just done something far more... unexpected. The brand's new campaign, "Expedition Impossible," is challenging flat-earthers to photograph the actual edge of the world (if they can find it, that is). First person to do it wins $100,000 worth of loot, including Columbia gear, office plants, and mannequins (?).

To announce the competition, CEO Tim Boyle took out an open letter in The New York Times inviting conspiracy theorists to "put your map where your mouth is." The brand will also be jumping into Reddit threads and YouTube comments to troll flat-earthers. It's part of Columbia's first brand platform relaunch in a decade. And it's clear the brand's moving away from the overdone outdoor gear campaigns toward something with actual personality.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Why is everything giving that one fashion guy’s Instagram who takes the “gritty” aesthetic too far and I have to turn up my phone's brightness just to make out the silhouette of his filthy Rick Owens (someone please ban him from VSCO btw.)

Films look washed. Ads look washed. Your friend’s Instagram feed looks washed. Even the new logos for major streamers are going grayscale like they’re attending a funeral.

Raz Cunningham wrote a piece about this exact phenomenon. And despite their disability, they can tell the world is losing its colour. When the literal colourblind guy sounds the alarm, you know something deeper than “aesthetic trends” is happening.

This goes beyond “blanding,” a phenomenon I wrote about last year. It’s everywhere, tainting everything with Chic Bleakness. It’s desaturation bleeding from our screens into the collective mood.

Cunningham uses the example of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. What should have been a film built on vibrant French costuming and theatrical set design was instead flattened into steely blue-grey nothingness in post-production.

MAX (formerly HBO Max) retired its distinctive royal blue for a stark black-and-white wordmark. Fashion has collapsed into a sea of neutrals. TikTok’s favourite filters turn you into a desaturated porcelain ghost. Even street posters look like someone sucked the life out of them with the Photoshop sponge tool.

Bright colour has become “tacky.” Seriousness, taste, maturity, all encoded in grayscale. It’s like the entire culture decided the only acceptable palette is “morally ambiguous desert.”

Colour used to be a flex. Think early-2010s internet aesthetic: Tumblr deep-blues, millennial sunset filters, neon signs in every café that read something embarrassing like “good vibes only.”

We were drowning in colour.

Now colour is seen as childish, tasteless, cheap. Muted, minimal, neutral is high status (we can thank a certain Mr. West partially for this curse).

This shift tracks with how marketing has evolved:

Gritty realism became synonymous with artistic credibility. The desaturated palette became shorthand for “serious cinema.” And eventually the whole industry adopted it like a dress code.

But this isn’t just Hollywood. Brands followed suit because their deepest fear is appearing unserious. Everything became tasteful. Safe. Monochrome. Flat.

Your favourite tech company wants to look like Succession, not Skittles.

This desaturation totally matches the cultural emotional palette. This time, it’s not aesthetic leading culture, but culture driving aesthetic.

We’re in a permacrisis. Economy wobbling. Climate dread humming nonstop in the background. Governments doing government things (badly). AI accelerating faster than anyone can process. Social media frying everyone’s nervous systems. Dating culture on life support. Loneliness epidemic at peak.

We don't want neon optimism. We don't want 2016 "spray everything with millennial pink." We don’t even want the saturated surrealism of the early TikTok era anymore.

We want calm. Control. Quiet. We want images that match the emotional numbness we’ve developed as a survival tactic.

There’s a reason the “sad beige parent” discourse blew up. Neutrals feel like safety when everything else feels chaotic. A beige living room is a small, controlled universe when the outside world resembles a freaking biblical plague highlight reel.

Colour overload feels like stimulus. Muted palettes feel like rest, I guess?

Even brands are leaning into monochrome. Not just because it’s tasteful, but because it telegraphs stability in a world where everything feels anything but stable. A black-and-white logo is a visual Xanax. And we’re popping like a sadboi rapper from the mid-2000s.

Yeah, the world is losing colour. But we kind of asked for it.

We’ve hit peak grayscale saturation, which means colour is inevitably about to fight its way back. Thank the lord.

We're already seeing cracks:

Even in marketing, the pendulum is twitching. Notice how the most exciting brands right now (youth culture, alt beauty, niche creators) are sneaking colour back in? Bold, intentional vibrancy is officially back on the menu.

We’re craving something that feels alive again.

Here’s the part where I should say no, relax, everything’s fine. But I won’t insult you. Because I also need to hear that myself.

Aesthetics always reveal what a culture is too afraid to articulate directly. If everything looks drained, dull, and washed out, it’s because we feel that way: overstimulated, under-optimistic, and stuck in a timeline that feels increasingly surreal.

But it’s also a signal.

Culture mutes itself right before it bursts.

The 60s psychedelia followed the 50s austerity. The 90s technicolour rave era followed late-80s burnout. Late-2000s hyper-colour came after the grayscale recession mood. We mute, then we explode.

So, if the world feels beige right now, it’s not the final chapter. It’s the loading screen before a palette shift.

And maybe (hopefully) the next cultural colour we reach for won’t just be aesthetic. Maybe it’ll mean we’re ready for a brighter future.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

This trend has become an anthem for all my overthinkers that are too stunned to speak. It's perfect for articulating moments that have left you speechless, emotional, or just completely unsure how to react.

The audio comes from the YouTuber Payton King. In the clip, he stutters out, "So, that's like the most…" but trails off mid-sentence, and fully blanks. 

My favourite videos of this trend are:

Lip-sync to this audio with the on-screen text describing a situation where you felt awkward. For a more dramatic effect, speed up the video and include hand gestures. 

A few ideas to get you started:

-Raewyn Zhao, Intern

😲WTF I didn’t know they did that
✨Daily inspo Do what’s interesting to you
😊Soooo satisfying Crazy car deep clean
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight Crispy chicken green goddess salad

Hey Theia!

I'll preface this by saying that vlogs can be hard to pull off! But if you want to use them as a content style, the thing to remember is they need to follow the structure of a story: set up, conflict, resolution. It's tempting to think of a vlog as just a documentation of your day. But if you create one that is literally just what you did in chronological order, it will probably be pretty boring.

Instead, you should think of your vlog in terms of the wider story you want to tell. This might mean editing your footage out of order so you can tell that story effectively. So instead of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened," your vlog should convey the idea of cause and effect. This happened, therefore this happened. Each scene has some sort of challenge or conflict, which then leads to what happens next. If you use this kind of storytelling, your vlogs will come off much better than if you're just documenting your day.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.