At the end of 2015, Pantone, the world-renowned authority on color, announced Rose Quartz and Serenity Blue as the colors of the year.

Throughout the year, we seemed to find these two colors on everything we looked at: runway shows, magazine covers, product packaging, new designs for handbags and garments, and even on Bentley cars.

Pantone's color of the year seems to dictate where the world is headed. SocialBeta had the chance to interview Ron Potesky, Senior Vice President of Pantone, and Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute, about how Pantone formulates the color of the year, and what kind of logic and thinking is behind the color of the year.

Q: What kind of services does Pantone provide, and can you give us a brief introduction?

A: Pantone has three main businesses: a color card service for marketed products; and color consulting and licensed merchandise.

Q: Why did Pantone launch the Representative Color of the Year? Does the color of the year become less popular the next year?

A: We don't think there is such a thing as an outdated color. We think there is a continuity of color, and the function of the color of the year is in a way to draw attention to it. Every year we introduce a color of the year to get people talking about it and to diversify it and pair it with other colors, that's our goal.

Q: How is Pantone's Color of the Year selected? What does the Color of the Year research entail?

A: We have a team of colorists from the Color Institute who began their research in the spring of the previous year, traveling around the world and searching for what might be the next year's trend colors along the way. We travel around the world collecting new color influences, which may come from the entertainment industry, such as movies or TV shows, stage lighting; from the art and fashion worlds, from the design field, from popular tourist destinations, from new lifestyles and lifestyles, from socio-economic phenomena, from major sporting events, etc.

We also look at the psychology and logic of color to understand what people expect from color emotions and how color can help people meet their needs. We also study the dynamics of social situations around the world, the social functions of color, and the impact of color on a global scale.

In the spring we gather inspiration, and in the summer we hold a fair and open discussion, where we strip away our emotions and preferences, compare and contrast the material we've gathered, and find strong points of support, usually by late summer or early fall.