Pantone is drunk on dumb bitch juice if it thinks some color called "Mocha Mousse" is the vibe entering 2025. No color is more now than that Gak green. You know the one: it's like if Slimer squeaked out a nice, oozy shart or the Toxic Avenger had visible body odor. The color percolated in the zeitgeist all year, like when the nail polish brand Essie dropped Main Character Moment as part of its spring 2024 collection. Then in May, Charli XCX had a wall painted the shade in Brooklyn to tease her forthcoming album brat, and within a month that rancid fart color was everywhere. Pitchfork Music Festival even used it as part of this year's tripped-out, uncanny valley branding before announcing its time in Chicago was over. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: it was the year of radioactive green.

Since 1999, the Pantone Color Institute has picked a color of the year, supposedly less as a trend forecast and more as a response to what the world "needs." Earlier this month, it announced 2025's color is a blushy brown. (For 2024, it picked something called "Peach Fuzz," which is a soft orange like a bellini mixed with rosé and might be the official gang color of wine moms.) On its website, Pantone describes Mocha Mousse as embodying "relaxed elegance." The company's executive director, Leatrice Eiseman, told TIME it's "genderless" and "authentic" -- a color that addresses a need for "harmony."

But there's nothing neutral about so-called "neutrals" like Pantone's creamy mahogany; they're defined by what the dominant social order considers least offensive. Mocha Mousse is basically a sadd color -- one of the limited drab (aka "serious") tones permitted by 17th-century Puritans -- that's been rebranded with luxury language. By emphasizing all the things the color sidesteps -- things such as gender and artifice -- Pantone reveals its desire to soothe the anxieties of people who fit neatly into a techno-fascist system of authentication that leaves everyone else vulnerable. Radioactive green is everything Mocha Mousse is not.

There's nothing timeless or elegant about this green. It's a symptom of chaotic 90s revivalism -- a color embedded deep in the childhood nostalgia of anyone born between the late 1970s and early 2000s. One of Nickelodeon's flagship shows was the sketch comedy/game show You Can't Do That on Television, which it acquired in 1981 and regularly featured "sliming" -- unleashing a deluge of green goo on someone as an act of humiliation and celebration in equal measure. Dripping neon ooze became synonymous with the brand and leaked into other Nickelodeon shows, like Double Dare. Using countercultural aesthetics like gross-out humor and rock 'n' roll, the network reached its cultural zenith in the 90s. The antiauthoritian stamp of the underground is in the visuals, soundtracks, and plotlines of shows such as The Adventures of Pete & Pete, The Ren & Stimpy Show, and Rocko's Modern Life. Even if you weren't a kid who had cable at that time, there was a sense of disgusting deliciousness and free-spirited abandon that you associated with that green.

The color was for unlikely heroes. It made you stronger, braver, cooler, and street smarter, like the ooze that made the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it was used to market the decade's greatest sugar waters. In 1987, Coca-Cola's Hi-C rebranded its Citrus Cooler as Ecto Cooler to capitalize on the success of the Ghostbusters franchise. The drink had a tangy, unplaceable flavor and something to do with the character Slimer; as a child, I quietly thought of it as his urine because that seemed a more plausible (and funnier) explanation for the taste than anything resembling fruit.

In 1997, Coca-Cola tried to compete with Pepsi's Mountain Dew by launching another citrus-inspired hit of glucose: Surge. To give it extra zing, the soda used maltodextrin -- then popular amongst bodybuilders -- and it was marketed as loud and energetic. In one commercial, teen boys clamor like a frenzied pack of zombies across an obstacle course in the middle of an urban street made of abandoned couches to, as the voice-over says, "Feed the rush." In another, they slip and collide their way down a hallway slicked with soap and water in a competition for the blessed beverage. The same year Surge launched, Gregg Araki released Nowhere, the final and arguably best-known installment of his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy -- three 90s movies that focused on teen alienation and underground culture. Nowhere's poster was the same radioactive green.

Charli XCX is no stranger to Araki (she's appearing in his next film), and Billboard cites the title cards of his 2007 film Smiley Face as part of the inspiration for brat's cover. She told Vogue Singapore: "I wanted to go with an offensive, off-trend shade of green to trigger the idea of something being wrong. I'd like for us to question our expectations of pop culture -- why are some things considered good and acceptable, and some things deemed bad?"

That other cultural behemoths, like Essie and Pitchfork Music Festival, were already off to the races with neon green shows Charli didn't set the trend; she was on trend. But Charli did give the trend language that amplified its reach: It's for brats. Chaos agents. People whose existences call attention to something others find uncomfortable. Like Mocha Mousse, neon green is not gendered. In fact, green has emerged as the color of choice among parents who are foregoing gender reveals. It's also abundant in nature, which is what Pantone emphasized when it picked a similar, albeit more subdued green for its Color of the Year in 2017. But it's that extra hint of neon -- that bonus squirt of mellow yellow -- that makes the green we've been seeing everywhere feel plastic or alien, and that's precisely why people like it.

Having a fake or foreign quality speaks to anyone trying to celebrate a cyborg or outsider existence -- whether that's one conferred by choice, force, or some combination of the two. For example, the U.S. should be mortified to be a country where it's easier to kill an insurance company CEO than it is to access care for a debilitating spinal condition. And yet it's us, the people who have to fight regularly with the architects of this system or forgo health coverage altogether -- which is to say, most Americans -- who are regularly embarrassed. We know a hero when we see one: he's a guy named Luigi, and he wears a radioactive green hat and shirt when he goes adventuring with his brother Mario. Why can an insurance company delay, deny, or depose lifesaving care to policyholders, but when a policyholder says "delay, deny, depose" to an insurance company it results in jail time? Why are some things considered good and acceptable, and some things deemed bad? This country slimes too many of us in humiliating ways every single day, so the slime color has gotten popular in a celebratory way. It is the best of times, it is the worst of times: it is slime time.