Comment by jcalx

> It’s not just cars — a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.

That is... not what that first chart ("Percent of pixels") shows? Much the opposite — reddish beige to taupe dominated the 1800s and slowly dwindled to ~20% by 2020. Meanwhile, greens and blues became a lot more common from 1960 onward.

To this article's credit, it does acknowledge the shift towards industrial materials, but it's still worth reading the article [0] where this chart originates. The nature of photographing objects contributes to the wider range of brown hues in older objects:

> The wide range of colours in the telegraph comes in large part from the mahogany wood used in its construction. But the colours also come from its shape (the rounded pillars reflect light and create shadows) as well as its age (the wear and tear creates colour variations).

whereas more recent objects trend toward smaller sizes and homogenous materials that photograph more evenly:

> In contrast, the metal and plastic materials in the iPhone give much less variation. It also has a more basic shape and is in better condition.

The pure grayscale band at the top of that chart has expanded significantly, but (variation in beige-ishness aside) can you really say that the left side of the graph is much less homogenous?

[0] https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...