The current trends for color can be viewed like a road map. Men, women, and children are each on a different journey, following their own trend-path. This is an era of color extremes and complementary contradictions. We can swing the pendulum and emerge with the current trend-of-choice.

When it comes to color, eyewear is riding a trend of special effects and tecno-materials. Glasses appear, feel, respond, and react to light differently through the addition of layers, marbling, glazing, blending, and sparkling. The effects create the illusion of various degrees of transparency, translucency, and opaqueness.

COLOR INFLUENCES

Lifestyle helps to determine some visual cycles through new materials and combinations thereof. When making color choices, designers consider the age, career, hobby/sports, personal styles of the audience, and the scale, poise, pattern, texture, hue, value, and chroma of different individuals. After the evaluation of these characteristics, they create their mold--then break it!

The bottom line is that frame colors are going both cooler and hotter, sleeker and textured, simpler and complex. Blue is showing up everywhere in greens, reds, purples, browns, greys and pale pinks! But, they're "popping" with a wild, warm hue. Metals are "environmental," appearing earthy and unpolished. They are mixed with plastics and other special effects.

A COLOR WHO'S WHO

Gender-bending is also reaching a new level when it comes to color. It's not simply unisex anymore. It's masculine with a feminine twist and feminine with a masculine spin--which is referred to as "gender-fiction."

Women. Women often express themselves by going to the fashion hues in eyewear--especially with a multiple-pair wardrobe. This season for women, visualize cooler greens from kelly to khaki and olive; and imagine deep purple-blues, royal violets, and flashing fuschias. Now, add citrus greens, yellows and oranges. Envision deep and earthy browns, and complex greys that are no longer just neutrals--but a combination of purples, greens and blues with grey. Become creative with geometrics, too. Texture and special effects go hand-in-hand.

Men. Men are often driven by their workplace identity. They view form and function as the mainstay in substantial neutrals and metals. For men, select a rich neutral color or a deep valued-hue in brown, grey, blue, or red. Also, expect an abundance of sleekly carved natural-looking metals. Angles are an integral part of this customer's well-guarded simplicity.

Kids. Kids will continue to chase rainbows and follow their fantasy, with the help of their parents. Little girls might select pale blues, pinks, yellows, and cool purples. Young boys follow super hero trends and select similar hues in deeper values.

Mature customers. Mature customers seem to act younger and more experimental, possibly due to the computer-chip connection. They are often soft-trended, selecting from a less flashy version of the mainstream. Consider metals (that reflect the hair, eyes or skin color) with an "easy twist."

Color trends are as contrasting as our lives, with balance as the optimum result. Our influences are many--mind, body, and spirit; new-aging; the softening of technology; the sophisticated consumer; environmental resources; customization; and the new millennium syndrome. FB

Kayte VanDeMarke is the owner of Presentation!, an international design firm. She is also a member of the Color Marketing Group (CMG), an Alexandria, Va.-based color trend forecasting company.