Opinions

The Slow Death of Beauty in the Modern World

BYYassine Hariss

September 4, 2026

At some point, everything around us started losing its color. New-build apartments came dressed in varying shades of grey, cafés began looking like they had all been designed by the same person, brands stripped their logos down to increasingly anonymous sans-serif fonts, and even children’s toys started appearing in muted shades of cream, taupe and beige.

There is now a name for this gradual draining of personality from the things around us: “beigeification.” The term describes the growing preference for neutral tones, clean lines, and minimalist design at the expense of bright colors, intricate details, and playful patterns. Once you start paying attention, it really does seem to be everywhere. Fast-food chains that once looked like playgrounds now resemble airport lounges; new buildings are increasingly difficult to tell apart, while shops and restaurants on opposite sides of the world somehow end up sharing the same exposed concrete, stainless steel, and carefully placed warm lighting.

Naturally, social media did what it does best and turned the whole thing into a debate. Before-and-after images began circulating of everything from shopping centers and cars to toys, logos and public spaces, placing the colorful designs of decades past alongside their noticeably greyer contemporary replacements. The comparisons are hard to ignore. What was once bright, playful and full of visual detail has increasingly been stripped back, simplified and, in many cases, drained of color altogether.

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Une publication partagée par MILLE (@mille_world)

On the surface, nostalgia merchants seem like they might have a point. Look at enough of these comparisons and it becomes difficult to deny that something has changed. The obvious conclusion is that we’ve simply developed worse taste. That somewhere between minimalism becoming fashionable and Pinterest-perfect interiors becoming something to aspire to, we slowly started sanding away anything too colorful, too detailed, or too individual.

There is also a more uncomfortable history sitting underneath our preference for all this restraint. Ideas about what constitutes “good taste” have never developed in a vacuum, and the rise of modernism came with its own ideas about which cultures represented progress and which supposedly belonged to the past. Ornament, color, and decoration were often placed firmly on the wrong side of that divide.

Few people made that hierarchy clearer than Austrian architect Adolf Loos, one of the early figures of European modernism. In his influential essay Ornament and Crime, Loos argued that “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use.” Elsewhere in the same essay, he contrasted the supposedly civilized modern European with the heavily ornamented “Papuan,” writing that what was natural for the latter was a “symptom of degeneration” in modern man.

The racism is hardly hidden between the lines. Loos explicitly connected the absence of ornament with cultural advancement, while associating decoration with people and societies he considered less developed. He would eventually declare that “lack of ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.” More than a century later, nobody needs to subscribe to Loos’ worldview for some of its assumptions to feel strangely familiar.

None of this means minimalism itself is inherently racist, nor that everyone painting their kitchen beige is unknowingly participating in some grand colonial project. But it does complicate the idea that our definition of “good taste” is entirely neutral. The aesthetic hierarchy that placed simplicity, restraint, and the rejection of ornament alongside ideas of progress developed, at least in part, during a period when Europeans were also busy ranking cultures and peoples according to their own supposed level of civilization. Some of those associations have proved remarkably difficult to shake.

Of course, taste and history only explain part of how we ended up here. The spread of this stripped-back aesthetic has also been helped along by something far less ideological and much more mundane: money. Detailed furniture takes longer to manufacture, maintaining decorative public spaces costs money, and producing one simple logo that works on everything from a billboard to a smartphone screen is easier than managing a complicated visual identity. Even neutral interiors make commercial sense, because they are less likely to offend anyone, fall out of fashion quite as quickly or require expensive changes when a property changes hands.

Beauty, in other words, comes with a bill. And when companies, developers, and governments constantly look for places to cut costs, ornamentation, color, and character can very quickly start looking like unnecessary expenses.

The problem becomes slightly harder to dismiss when the same logic starts shaping the spaces we all have to live in, those mainly funded by government budgets, such as parks, schools, train stations, housing developments, pavements, benches, playgrounds and entire neighbourhoods. These are not things we can simply choose not to buy. They form the backdrop to everyday life, and when beauty becomes one of the first things sacrificed in the name of efficiency, the consequences stretch considerably further than whether or not something looks nice on Instagram.

From a strictly practical perspective, almost everything decorative can be labeled unnecessary. And from there, usefulness becomes the only standard by which something is judged, making almost anything that makes life a little more pleasant be dismissed as an indulgence. Why spend more on an ornate façade when a blank concrete wall performs exactly the same structural function? Why plant flowers when grass is easier to maintain? Why commission an artist to decorate a station when leaving the walls bare costs much less?

Taken individually, these decisions can seem perfectly reasonable. Taken together, however, they slowly produce a world built around the cheapest acceptable version of everything. Not necessarily ugly enough to cause outrage, nor dysfunctional enough to demand replacing, but just bland enough that nobody is expected to care.

Because the disappearance of colour is one thing, the disappearance of the idea that ordinary people deserve to encounter beauty in their everyday lives is another entirely. Why would any of that matter? A bench is still a bench, a school still teaches children and a train will get you from A to B regardless of whether there is a mosaic inside of it. Beauty, after all, does not make any of these things work better.

But beauty also comes with the uncomfortable question of what else that money could have paid for: how many schools, hospitals or homes could have been built instead? It’s a pretty difficult argument to fight against. If the choice really is between building one beautiful school and two slightly uglier ones, most of us would probably pick the latter. If ditching the mosaic inside a train station means another neighbourhood finally gets a line of its own, then suddenly those bare walls don’t seem all that bad.

The crux of the matter probably lies in the assumption that, had we lived in another era, our everyday surroundings would simply have been more beautiful. We imagine ourselves learning in elaborately decorated schools, swimming in public pools lined with colorful tiles and walking home past buildings designed by architects who seemingly had more than a ruler and a grey paint catalogue at their disposal. The reality, however, would have been far less romantic. Buildings and public spaces like these were expensive to construct, often even more expensive to maintain and, depending on the period we’re looking back on, hardly accessible to everyone. That beautiful public swimming pool might have been several districts away, while the ornate building we admire today may have been reserved for people with enough money or status to enter it in the first place. Beauty matters, of course, but our nostalgia can make us forget that many of the beautiful places that survived from the past were never designed to be enjoyed equally.

You can see the decline of society just by looking at what we used to build versus what we build now. pic.twitter.com/mqkeIe3HHJ
— Dr. Simon (@goddek) August 22, 2026

And that is the inconvenient part that tends to get left out of the beigeification conversation. We can look back at an ornate Victorian swimming pool or an Art Nouveau metro entrance and wonder why we don’t build things like that anymore, without asking the less romantic question of how much it would cost to build hundreds of them today. Sometimes making things simpler and cheaper is precisely what allows us to make more of them.

That’s the trade-off: beauty gets sacrificed so everyday life can become more accessible. A plain school where one is needed beats an architectural masterpiece three towns away. The same goes for housing, hospitals, transport, and pretty much everything else we rely on. So long live grey, as long as it means more people get a roof over their heads, a hospital nearby, or a train that actually stops somewhere close to where they live.

The Slow Death of Beauty in the Modern World

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